Crowe IFRS 17 workshop on Tuesday

Business Sunday 08/March/2020 16:57 PM
By: Times News Service
Crowe IFRS 17 workshop on Tuesday

Muscat: Ahmed Al Mamari, Director General of Insurance supervision at the Capital Market Authority will inaugurate the two days IFRS 17 workshop at the Park Inn Restaurant on Tuesday.
The workshop is being organised by Crowe, a leading auditing and consulting firm in the Sultanate. Davis Kallukaran, Managing Partner at Crowe Oman said, “IFRS 17 is to be applied by the insurance industry worldwide, effective from the year 2022. The Capital Market Authority of Oman has mandated a well-planned; three-phase implementation programme requiring insurance companies to be geared up for the implementation well ahead of the deadline. Most of the local insurance companies have completed the Gap Analysis in Phase-1 and are now preparing for the long-drawn Phases 2 and 3 of implementation."
CMA will be represented at the workshop by the technical experts who will be making a presentation on IFRS 17- A way forward. According to James Ravi, Director, Audit & Assurance at Crowe, Understanding and implementing IFRS 17, demand incisive knowledge of the insurance contracts and the skillset to recognise their impact in the financial statements. Some of the concepts in the new standard are challenging even to the experts in the industry who struggle to demystify them. Insurance companies understand the need to acquire the necessary skills and expertise to rightly implement the new standard within the timeframe stipulated by the regulators.
Elaborating on IFRS 17, Karl Jackson, Partner, Audit & Assurance said, “IFRS 9 was a major multi-year project for the banks that required extensive input from external consultants and software providers, as in-house resources were not adequate. It is already obvious that IFRS 17 will place a similar burden with similar requirements for substantial external assistance on the insurance companies. The only saving grace is that the types of insurance products offered in the Oman market tend towards the simple end of the scale, so some of the more complex aspects of IFRS 17 can be avoided.”
The lead faculty for the workshop is Robert Phelps, an expert on the subject matter who said, “The insurance industry is very large, very old, multi-national with a rich variety of contracts and accounting practices. In the interests of global consistency and transparency, IFRS 17 Insurance Contracts is essentially applying basic IFRS principles in developing a financial reporting solution for insurance contracts. Its ambition is therefore huge. Depending on the type of contract an insurance company issues, IFRS 17 accounting can be easy, or hard or somewhere in between. The aim of our training workshop is to demystify much of this by running the numbers for various real-life scenarios,” he added.