Have the new lease accounting standards left your firm and its business clients reeling from implementation overload? If so, you and your clients are not alone. The new lease standard, ASC 842, became effective for public business entities as of January 2019. For many public companies — many of whom were already grappling with the new revenue recognition standard — implementation proved much more time-consuming and cumbersome than initially anticipated. "[The new lease accounting standard] was probably a little bit more of a lift than companies first imagined. I think most companies spent a significant amount of time putting their efforts around the adoption of ASC 606. ... One would have jumped to the conclusion, I think, that companies would have handled leases in a similar fashion given, I would say, the severity of the change, but I don't think that was one of the things that we saw being done as rigorously as it was for the adoption of [revenue recognition]... I don't know if they understood the severity of the scope of the project as much as they did with [ASC 606]," explained Michael Stevenson, national practice leader for the accounting and reporting advisory services group in the Dallas office of Top 7 Firm BDO USA.
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