GASB issues additional guidance on GASB 84, Fiduciary Activities
With the required implementation of GASB 84, Fiduciary Activities just around the corner, many organizations have been running various transactions through the GASB 84 model to ascertain the appropriate future treatment. Determining whether a transaction is fiduciary or not has come with challenges and brought up a number of questions. Hoping to provide additional guidance to help organizations make more informed decisions in this area, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) recently issued Implementation Guide No. 2019-2, Fiduciary Activities. The Implementation Guide, which is an authoritative document, includes questions and answers on topics such as identifying fiduciary activities and reporting fiduciary activities.
The Implementation Guide is particularly helpful because it provides many common scenarios and how the GASB would apply the concepts under this new standard to that specific fact-pattern. Check out the Implementation Guide to find answers on how to treat certain defined contribution or defined benefit plans, retainages, payroll withholdings, performance deposits, among others. The guide also provides specific examples related to student organizations or scholarship funds that can be analogized to circumstances that may exist in your entity.
Reading this Implementation Guide is key to truly understanding how to think about fiduciary activities. The Implementation Guide is effective concurrent with the implementation of GASB 84 itself.
If you have any questions on GASB 84 implementation, please reach out to us today.
