Expensing of share-based payments and its impact on large UK companies

This paper investigates the impact of one of the most controversial and strongly-opposed accounting standards of recent years affecting UK companies, IFRS 2/FRS 20. The standard requires the expensing of share-based payments. The findings of the study show that the accounting standards IFRS 2/FRS 20 have had only a modest impact upon selected performance measures. Findings of this research are out of line with previous studies, which examined the position prior to the implementation of mandatory expensing and mainly cover other countries. Given the modest impact, a question arises as to why the standard was opposed so strongly. It could be concluded that the impact of the standard was overstated to fuel opposition.