IFRS Helpline Newsletter: March 2021

IFRS 16: Identifying a Lease

As announced in our January newsletter, we are addressing issues surrounding IFRS 16 Leasing in a short newsletter series. The previous newsletters have dealt with the following topics:

January 2021: “Has the plane landed – Introduction to our IFRS 16 series”
February 2021: “IFRS 16: Scope and Exemptions”

In today’s newsletter, we focus on identifying a lease under IFRS 16.
If identifying leases under the ‘old’ IAS 17 was not always easy – even top-flight leasing experts had problems with the ‘embedded leases‘ that were the subject of the related interpretation, IFRIC 4 – it has not really become much easier to determine whether (or not) there is a lease in some specific cases for the purposes of IFRS 16. Extensive and detailed stipulations can be found in IFRS 16.9-11 in conjunction with B9-B33. At this point, just take a quick look at the flowchart in IFRS 16.B31.