Current issues

There’s a lot that has been written relatively recently by Tom Clendon in the P2 technical articles page about financial assets and liabilities.

Leases are still topical with the proposal to drop the distinction between finance and operating leases

However, if it were me in that exam room and I were faced with a 25 mark essay / discussion question, I would look again at questions 2 and 3 to see if I knew enough in those areas to get me a decent score. When attempting a pure written answer with no numbers to play around with, it is very difficult (in my view) to find 25 convincing points to bring into an answer.

Questions 2 and 3 invariably are broken down into 4 or 5 different problem areas (you MUST attempt ALL those 4 or 5 – even though you may feel that you don’t know enough)

And the questions are often based on what the chief accountant has done or is proposing to do. Just occasionally the examiner will have the chief accountant proposing the appropriate treatment but, more often than not the proposed treatment is incorrect. If in doubt, it’s probably incorrect!