Impacts on Convergence of International Lease Accounting Standards for Lessee

Abstract

Leases transactions (capital or operating) have been changining during the last decades to adopt market and accounting issues in a maner to compose their records since the initial adoption of specific legislation until nowadays. As a major source of financing assets and rights, companies globally record in their balance sheets significant figures related to this operation, which provides to a lessee the ownership of certain assets, eventhough there is no  intention to acquire at the end of a certain period (usually limited by contract). This convertion process makes international accounting standards agents, after long period of discussions with lobby groups, have been disclosing the new leasing accounting standard since 2016, impacting in a specially the tenants (lessee). In this context, the present study aims to demonstrate the expected impacts with the normative changes and the accounting perspective on the leasing operations and their effects, mainly in the composition of the indebtedness (financial leverage) and current and dry liquidity indices. The new standard still demonstrates a tentative approach between the two main bodies, but leaves open great gaps in the writing and practice of the new standard for US GAAP and IFRS. At the time of the disclosure of this research, there was no update regarding the CPC (Accounting Pronouncements Committee) in Brazil.