Accounting for “Insurance Contracts” According to IASB Exposure Draft—Is the Information Useful?

The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB, former IASC) has been working on a new international standard for insurance contracts based on fair value for about 10 years now. However, details on how to measure such a value in practice were unclear for a long time. A first indication of how an accounting model for insurance liabilities could look like was given by the Discussion Paper from May 2007 and concretised with the publication of the IASB Exposure Draft “Insurance Contracts”. This paper aims to analyse the extent to which the accounting model for insurance liabilities introduced in the Exposure Draft is qualified to generate useful information to users of financial statements. Furthermore, we give recommendations about which fields need further adjustments in order to comply with decision usefulness as the overriding principle.