Formation of accounting policies of a mining enterprise in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards

Abstract

Failure to take into account the perceived impacts of climate change threatens business continuity, for example, in agriculture, food production, the transport sector, and the extractive industry. Building a sustainable development strategy at mining enterprises requires the establishment of scientifically based goals. This will allow them to be specified in operational plans, budgets, and forecasts as part of the strategy. The development of a formalized plan should be based on data from the accounting system, the disclosure of which depends on the adopted accounting policy of the enterprise. Despite the existing methodological and methodical developments regarding the reflection of information in the financial statements of the mining enterprise, there are still debatable issues regarding the attribution to capitalization or expenses of the current period of accruals for individual stages of exploration and evaluation, regarding the accounting of geological information, seismic operations, exploration drilling, depreciation by the production method, accounting and evaluation of hydraulic fracturing and other issues. The complexity of developing an accounting methodology is associated with problems of terminology; unclear formulation of the nature of the asset arising from mining activities; the level of aggregation of information; unclear understanding of the types of mining activities; differentiation of the processes of exploration and evaluation of natural resources at mining enterprises from research activities; recognition of an individual asset «work in progress»; subjectivity associated with assumptions about fair value measurement and other issues. The article proposes disclosure of certain provisions of the accounting policy, in particular, on investment real estate, reserves, employee benefits, capitalized costs for overburden, overburden costs, exploration and evaluation costs of minerals, quarry development costs, intangible assets, reserve for quarry reclamation, borrowing costs, income recognition.

Keywords

• mining company
• financial statements
• accounting policies
• mineral exploration and evaluation costs
• international financial reporting standards