BNA Snapshot Major Impact: The one-year delay, sought by many companies operating under U.S. GAAP, will ease their transition costs and make it easier for preparing to implement a full retrospective application of the rules to earlier financial statements. Crucial Caveat: IASB must also follow FASB's lead in granting a delay or international filers won't benefit from the deferral and suspicions will grow that the entire converged standard could come unraveled.By Steven MarcyThe Financial Accounting Standards Board proposed a one-year extension of the revenue-recognition date because of its potential for containing transition costs and because many practitioners said the delay would provide more time to fully apply the new rules retrospectively to their earlier financial statements, a FASB staff accountant told a PwC webcast.FASB voted 4-3 April 1 to propose allowing public companies to implement the revenue rules for annual periods beginning after Dec. 15, 2017, and for nonpublic companies to apply them to annual periods beginning after Dec. 15, 2018. Companies could still adopt the guidance at the original Jan. 1, 2017, effective date if they wish (see related story).Accommodating Cost, Retrospective Application A “couple of the common” reasons for wanting a delay were that it “would allow implementation costs to be reduced” and that “a lot of organizations seemed to have a preference, or at least a goal, for a full retrospective transition approach, and they thought that an additional year would afford them the opportunity to do that,” Cullen Walsh, FASB assistant director of research and a manager of the revenue-recognition Resource Transition Group, told the April 1 webcast.FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board issued a converged revenue-recognition standard in May 2014 (10 APPR 525, 6/6/14). Unknown is whether IASB will follow suit in granting an implementation delay. An IASB spokesperson told Bloomberg BNA April 1 that the board probably will consider the issue at a late-April meeting.IASB Concurrence on Delay Vital A FASB deferral without a matching move by IASB would cause problems, PwC webcast participants said.A decision by IASB not to grant a delay could undermine the entire benefit of a deferral, especially for those companies that must prepare their statements...