The Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board are trying to get all the details right in their bid to create a single, global standard for recognizing revenue.

 
The boards June 15 decided to re-expose their proposal for revenue recognition, a slightly modified proposal they hope to issue in July with a 120-day comment period. Their aim is to ensure it can be applied consistently across various types of transactions and industries. They are trying to guarantee the standard will contain no unintended consequences in a facet of accounting that has far-reaching impacts throughout a financial report.

 
“I think in this case because revenue is the top line it drives everything else in the income statement,” said IASB member Patricia McConnell. “None of the changes that we've made are significant, but it's the number of changes that we've made, the volume of changes that we made in aggregate I think that drives me to the conclusion we have to re-expose to make sure that those changes interact properly, that the words describe them properly, that they're applied properly.”

 
FASB Chairman Leslie Seidman said it is appropriate for the boards to do a re-exposure of the whole standard, highlighting those key changes. “[We're] looking for clarity, and whether these paragraphs relate to each other and are understandable in the way that we intend,” she said.

 
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 - Steven Marcy, Accounting Policy & Practice Report