Not-for-profit healthcare, higher education, and other not-for-profit and government organizations. Emerging issues: Summary of emerging accounting, tax and regulatory issues in 2008

This year's edition of Emerging issues* describes the accounting, financial reporting, tax and regulatory compliance issues that are specifically tailored to concentrate on areas of interest to not-for-profit organizations and governmental business-type activities. This summary will help you identify the issues you will face and guide you on how to overcome them. The summary is divided into six areas of relevance: FASB, GASB, AICPA, Other Issues, Regulatory and Tax.

Not-for-profits and governments face major changes in the year ahead including:

• With the upcoming launch of the MSRB’s "EMMA" system in the summer of 2009, investors and other interested parties will have unprecedented access to the audited financial statements, material event notices, and other continuing disclosure documents filed by not-for-profit and governmental municipal bond issuers.
• The anticipated launch of the FASB Accounting Standards Codification in the summer of 2009 is a major restructuring of US accounting standards that will affect the day-to-day work of nearly every financial professional who prepares, reviews, or audits financial statements of private sector organizations. Because a significant portion of the governmental GAAP hierarchy consists of pre-Codification FASB and AICPA standards that will cease to exist when the Codification becomes effective, the impact of the Codification also will be felt by the governmental sector.
• Not-for-profit organizations must begin applying FASB’s new fair value measurement model to many of their assets and liabilities in financial statements for years ended December 31, 2008 and thereafter. The impact of the change in the way fair value is measured is enormous. Nearly one-third of the topics in this year’s FASB section deal with fair value measurement issues, and GASB has also added a fair value measurement project to its research agenda.
• The advent of IFRS in the United States elevates concerns among not-for-profits and governmental BTAs related to comparability of financial reporting. Preparers, auditors and financial statement users currently struggle with interpreting measurement differences in financial statements prepared under standards issued by FASB and GASB, who increasingly appear to be taking different paths on recognition and measurement guidance for similar transactions. IFRS would interject yet a third set of standards.