Mary Mitchell O'Connor (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 5:

In page 13, to delete lines 8 to 14 and substitute the following:" "277A.(1) Subject to this section, the directors of a company may, before the operative date of the provisions of the Act of 2017specified in subsection (4) (the 'specified provisions of the Act of 2017'), opt to prepare and approve statutory financial statements for the company in accordance with those specified provisions for any financial year which commenced on or after 1 January 2015.".

This amendment is technical. This amendment removes the reference to the date 24 December 2016 from section 14. Deputies will recall that section 14 allows companies to apply the benefits of this Bill to financial statements in respect of some financial years that have now finished. This is considered important to mitigate the effects of delay with transposing the EU Accounting Directive. However, by including the end date of 24 December 2016, the Bill could have excluded some companies from using section 14 only because their financial year ended a few days after that date. It could also give rise to a gap where some companies could use section 14 to apply the new rules for one year, then have to revert to the old rules for a single year before applying the new rules again. Clearly, this would not be our intention.

This amendment is intended to ensure that there will be a smooth transition to the new reporting requirements and that section 14 will be useful in practice.

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