The Board is taking forward a project on heritage assets. The aim is to improve the quality of the financial reporting of heritage assets for entities such as museums holding collections of art, antiques and books and also entities that own and manage landscape or buildings for their environmental or historical qualities.

The Board has issued a revised Financial Reporting Exposure Draft (FRED 42) ‘Heritage Assets’. This proposes that enhanced disclosures should apply to all heritage assets regardless of whether these are reported in the balance sheet.

Having considered a number of alternative approaches, the Board is not persuaded there is a better accounting solution than the current FRS 15 based requirements. The proposals therefore require heritage assets to be reported in the balance sheet where information is available on cost or value.

The Board is requesting comments on FRED 42 by 10 October 2008.

Previously, the Board has issued a Discussion Paper 'Heritage Assets – Can Accounting do Better?' in January 2006 and a Financial Reporting Exposure Draft (FRED 40) 'Accounting for Heritage Assets' in December 2006. FRED 42 supercedes these two documents which can be downloaded from this web-page .

• Click here to download FRED 40
• Click here to download the Discussion Paper
  

Contact Project Director Alan O'Connor.

To find out how to obtain a hard copy of the Financial Reporting Exposure Draft 'Heritage Assets' (FRED 42) or FRED 40 ‘Accounting for Heritage Assets’ or the Discussion Paper 'Heritage Assets: Can Accounting do Better? see FRC Publications.