GASB Issues New Guidance on Pension Accounting Standards

State and local governments have now had time to process and implement GASB’s most recent pension accounting and financial reporting requirements.

This week, the agency released Statement No. 82, which clarifies and/or amends certain aspects of previous statements.

Details, from AccountingWeb:

Here’s what changed:

Presentation of payroll-related measures in required supplementary information. The new guidance amends Statement No. 67 and Statement No. 68 to require the presentation of covered payroll, defined as the payroll on which contributions to a pension plan are based, and ratios that use that measure. Statement No. 67 and Statement No. 68 previously required presentation of covered-employee payroll, which is the payroll of employees who are provided with pensions through the pension plan, and ratios that use that measure in schedules of required supplementary information.

Selection of assumptions. The new guidance clarifies that a deviation, as the term is used in Actuarial Standards of Practice issued by the Actuarial Standards Board, from the guidance in an Actuarial Standard of Practice is not considered to conform with the requirements of Statement No. 67, Statement No. 68, or Statement No. 73 for the selection of assumptions used in determining the total pension liability and related measures.

Classification of employer-paid member contributions. The new guidance clarifies that payments made by an employer to satisfy contribution requirements that are identified by the pension plan terms as “plan member contribution requirements” should be classified as “plan member contributions” for purposes of Statement No. 67 and as “employee contributions” for purposes of Statement No. 68. It also states that an employer’s expense and expenditures for those amounts should be recognized in the period for which the contribution is assessed and classified in the same manner as the employer classifies similar compensation other than pensions (for example, as salaries and wages or as fringe benefits).

See Statement 82 here.

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