WASHINGTON, DC—In the Wall Street Journal recently Art Garcia, CFO for Ryder System, said out loud what probably every finance executive has been thinking for the last year: Why can't regulators put both the forthcoming revenue-recognition and lease-accounting rules in place at the same time?

One could assume his thinking is as follows: it would be easier for companies to massively overhaul their accounting methodologies and books once and at the same time; some of the measures in one standard are contingent on measures in the other and back to back major accounting standard upgrades will surely lead to accounting standard fatigue.

The revenue recognition standard, briefly, is a massive overhaul of how the US Financial Accounting Standards Board will recognize revenue. Released last year, it is one of the convergence projects by FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board. It affects any public or private entity that has contracts with customers -- except for certain items, including leases. To say it is mammoth is an understatement, especially to accountants who best recognize the impact of the following statement: it replaces the transaction and industry-specific revenue recognition guidance under GAAP and replaces it with a principal-based approach. Yes. For the non-accountants reading this, suffice it to say, this is huge.

As is the lease accounting standard, which is also due to be released and implemented in final form within a few years, give or take. This standard is likely more familiar to readers as the industry has been warning of its impact for years.

All of this is to say that accounting issues are increasingly spilling over into other aspects of commercial real estate business operations.

Which would be fine, or at least business as usual. If nothing else, change is a staple in this industry.

But the standard-setting organizations have been showing a disconcerting tendency to move the goal posts, as well as ignore other rules that companies must also adhere. That huge, earth-shatteringly different revenue recognition standard? Turns out there are elements to it that could clash with tax regulations and how companies are expected to account for revenue with the Internal Revenue Service, according to Eric Lucas, a principal in KPMG's income tax and accounting group, in a recent article in CFO.com. The IRS has taken note and recently asked the industry for input on these differences, noting that "the new standards raise a number of substantive and procedural issues for the IRS, including whether the new standards are permissible methods of accounting for federal income tax purposes."

Or consider Garcia's wishful thinking about having the lease and revenue recognition standards.

"The new leases standards do rely, in many respects, on portions of the new revenue recognition standard," Avison Young's Chief Accounting Officer Patrick Scheibel, who is based in Chicago, tells GlobeSt.com.

"Therefore, the revenue recognition standard has to be in place in order for the leases standard to work," he says.

The revenue recognition standard's effective date is now being pushed to 2018, from its original 2017 date, which as it happens, lines up with expected effective date for lease accounting.

Okay, but what if the lease accounting standard is pushed forward again?

It may, Scheibel says. "All of the FASB's and IASB's public discussions thus far in 2015 have centered around 2018 as being the effective date for the new standards -- however, they have not yet officially set that date in stone."

"The FASB generally tries to give companies three years to implement a large accounting standard. Following that timeline, if the boards want to stick with a 2018 implementation date, then they need to get this project completed before the end of 2015."

FASB and IASB have been trying to complete this project for more than nine years, and there still are significant differences between the two boards. A further delay in the standard's release or required implementation date is not out of the question, Scheibel says.

Then there is this, the Atlanta-based Avison Young Principal Sean Moynihan tells GlobeSt.com: "Perhaps more importantly, whether the official effective date is 2018 or slips to 2019, a great number of companies -- both public and private -- will find that they need to transition to the new standards much sooner in order to be able to provide comparative financial data in their 2018 financial reporting, which is based upon the new standards."

For example, he says, in the US, public companies include at least three years of information in their financial statements. "Therefore those firms with a large number of leases will find they need to effectively transition their accounting in 2016 in order to be able to accurately report their comparative financial data."

Come back tomorrow for part 2 of this article when we discuss what real estate companies can do to navigate this complex and shifting environment.

Instant Insights /

No One Said Accounting Standards Are Easy But This Is Ridiculous

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