Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 20 May 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. John McDonnell:

I think the accounting standards have been developed to allow ... if you look at impairment, we're moving from an incurred loss to an expected loss model. That will mean that accounting standards will recognise loss quicker than in the past. I think that the disclosures and likely future disclosure ... there's much better disclosure around risk, etc., so I think there's a better chance that financial statements will alert to crisis moving into the future. But I would say that a set of financial statements are always going to be about a representation of the past and the past is not always going to be representative of future shocks, and a set of financial statements will never capture ... they might capture expected loss and that's the new model we're going to, but they won't capture unexpected loss. And even if a full set of financial statements were accounted for at fair value, if the market ... if there's a sudden shock in the markets, fair values can drop and they can drop very, very quickly and that can have a ... that can have a very difficult effect on a set of financial statements. Financial statements are always looking backwards, they are not looking forwards and they need to be viewed in that context. But there's been a couple of changes around going concern and the directors in ... the change around going concern is the going concern concept still remains but there's going to be a directors' viability statement into a set of financial statements going forward where the directors will have to give some disclosure around the viability of the business model over an horizon greater than ... greater than one year. And that obviously will have some impact.

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