draining development.pdf - Khazar University

Accounting for the Missing Billions 293closed in a group’s financial statements because a long list of disclosabletransactions of this sort is included in the standard.Unfortunately, the prospect of disclosure that this requirement createsis then dashed. IAS 24 proceeds to state that, while the disclosuremust be made separately for the parent company, subsidiaries, and otheridentified categories of related parties, the information within each suchcategory “may be disclosed in aggregate except when separate disclosureis necessary for an understanding of the effects of the related party transactionson the financial statements of the company.” As a result, all tradingby a subsidiary with all other subsidiaries can be aggregated into onenumber in most cases, and no indication need be given of the otherparty in a trade, what has been traded, or on what terms and where theother side of the transaction might be recorded.The result is obvious: the accounts and financial statements end upproviding no meaningful information at all on transfer pricing issues.The information is excluded from consolidated accounts and financialstatements because related-party trades between parents and their subsidiariesand between fellow subsidiaries are always excluded from theseaccounts, while the disclosure requirement on individual group membersis so limited that forming a view on transfer pricing is almostimpossible in most cases: it is rare for the other party to any transactionto be disclosed, especially within a large and complex group.This might be thought an accident. Regrettably it is not, as IAS 24makes clear. In the latest version of the standard, introductory note IN7states that “discussions [in the standard] on the pricing of transactionsand related disclosures between related parties have been removedbecause the Standard does not apply to the measurement of related partytransactions.”This is an extraordinary statement. Accounts prepared under IFRSsand their U.S. equivalents are the basis of corporate taxation in a greatmany countries in the world, but the International Accounting Standardthat is responsible for their promulgation says that it is not the purposeof the standard to assist in the measurement of matters related to transferpricing. Moreover, it offers no suggestion on how such matters shouldbe considered or measured.What is clear is that it is not the intent in the standards that the onlyother part of the IFRS environment that might provide information on