Accounting for exploration and evaluation (E&E) costs is one of the last major issues to remain largely unregulated by International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), even though extractive firms are an important part of several big stock markets. Under a temporary permissive standard (IFRS 6), which has been in place since 2004, firms use a wide range of accounting policies for E&E costs, thus undermining comparability. We review the IFRS annual reports of a large number of firms, looking for different policies. We identify many distinguishable methods of accounting. Along with this, we discover that disclosures are often confusing, partly because of the lack of definitions in IFRS 6. To aid insight into this complexity, we prepare a classification of these methods and give real examples of each. We then assess the methods in the context of IFRS 6 and other relevant parts of IFRS. We find that nearly all the methods comply with IFRS. This leads us to a proposal for narrowing the variety of practice by withdrawing IFRS 6, and putting E&E costs within the scope of IAS 38 Intangible Assets. As part of this, IAS 38 could be further revised to extend the scope of capitalisation of other development costs, thereby addressing one of the criticisms of current reporting practice and bringing IAS 38 more into line with the latest version of the Conceptual Framework.

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国际财务报告准则下采掘企业会计实务差异的解决方案

尽管采掘公司是几个大型股票市场的重要组成部分，但勘探和评估 (E&E) 成本的核算是最后一个基本上不受国际财务报告准则 (IFRS) 监管的主要问题之一。根据自 2004 年开始实施的临时宽松标准（IFRS 6），公司对 E&E 成本使用范围广泛的会计政策，从而削弱了可比性。我们审查大量公司的 IFRS 年度报告，寻找不同的政策。我们确定了许多可区分的会计方法。与此同时，我们发现披露往往令人困惑，部分原因是 IFRS 6 中缺乏定义。为了帮助深入了解这种复杂性，我们对这些方法进行了分类并给出了每种方法的真实示例。然后，我们在 IFRS 6 和 IFRS 其他相关部分的背景下评估这些方法。我们发现几乎所有的方法都符合国际财务报告准则。这导致我们提出了一项建议，即通过撤销 IFRS 6 来缩小实践的多样性，并将 E&E 成本纳入 IAS 38 的范围无形资产。作为其中的一部分，可以进一步修订 IAS 38 以扩大其他开发成本的资本化范围，从而解决对当前报告实践的批评之一，并使 IAS 38 更加符合最新版本的概念框架。