Specialised Public Service Assets 2012
The need for public service assets to be valued is increasing around the world. Increasingly governments are requiring public sector entities to produce financial statements that include certain assets at their current value. Valuations are also required for purposes other than financial reporting, including privatisation of government operations and for computing inter-departmental payments in lieu of taxation.
Although many assets held for public service use are similar to those held for commercial use and are exchanged sufficiently frequently to create readily available evidence of current values, many are specialised assets which are rarely, if ever, exchanged in the market. Also, specialised assets are frequently held for the provision of a public service that does not generate income or any other directly tangible benefit. Evidence has been provided to IVSC of considerable diversity in practice and also of disputes between different government entities as to how such specialised assets are to be valued. Accordingly it was agreed that the IVSC Professional Board would commence a project to produce guidance in the form of a Technical Information Paper.
In June 2011 a Project Brief was approved. At that stage the title was “Specialised Government Property”. A call for experts in the sector to join a Working Group to advise the Board was made. The group was formed in October 2011.
One of the initial findings of the Group was that public service assets are not necessarily government owned, and that the valuation issues arose from the nature of the assets, not the type of entity that owns them. In March 2012 the Board approved a change in the title to refer simply to public service assets.
An Exposure Draft was approved by the Board at its meeting in October 2012 and published on 30 November. The comment period expired on 28 February 2013.
Analysis of the comments received indicated that the scope of the draft was probably too wide as the respondents differed widely in their perception of the intended purpose of the proposed guidance. While nearly all respondents agreed that conceptually the approach to valuing an asset should be the same regardless of whether it was owned by a public or private sector entity, it was clear that in practice there are different regulations governing the valuation process, especially for financial reporting. At its meeting in June 2013 the Board agreed to narrow the focus of the project and to produce a revised draft for further consultation.
Working Group:
| IVSC Board members | ||
| Roy Farthing | Professional Board | Australia |
| Simon Landy | Standards Board | Thailand |
| Frank Bollmann | Standards Board | Germany |
| External Members | ||
| Bob Connolly | Opteon Bolton Connolly | United Kingdom |
| John Hentschel | Hentschel Real Estate Services | USA |
| Andrew Lennard | UK Accounting Standards Board | United Kingdom |
| Mikhail Soloviev | The National Research University | Russia |
| Graham Stalker | Valuation Office Agency | United Kingdom |
| Dusan Zupancic | Zving Konsultanti | Slovenia |
Background
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