The Financial Accounting Standards Board has scheduled a gut-check discussion on its plan to re-propose an overhaul to lease accounting as it continues to face questions and concerns over its revised approach.

After spending more than two years reworking and fine-tuning its intended lease accounting model following an August 2010 proposal, FASB has scheduled a 30-minute session for April 10 to discuss the “costs, benefits, and complexity associated with the guidance” in its still unpublished second draft of the proposed update to accounting standards. The board is scheduled to published its second draft in the second quarter of 2013.

FASB is still hearing objections from groups like the Equipment Leasing and Finance Association and a coalition of railcar lessors over its planned approach for distinguishing between leases that resemble acquisitions of property compared with those that are more like rental agreements. According to William Sutton, president and CEO of ELFA, FASB's planned model does not reflect the economics of a lease contract.

“It does not provide incremental information beneficial to a cross section of users (of financial statements), and it involves costly and complex accounting analysis and calculations which we do not believe are commensurate with the benefits to users of financial statements,” Sutton wrote to FASB in an unsolicited comment letter as FASB continued its deliberations.

More recently, Keidanren, a Japanese business federation of more than 1,400 organizations, wrote to FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board renewing their objections to the anticipated proposal. Reminding the boards of continued concerns over cost and complexity, Keidanren points out the tentative decisions do not seem to address issues raised following the 2010 proposal. “Under the new standard, transactions made for the purpose of receiving services would ultimately be accounted for as financial transactions,” the group wrote. “With this treatment not reflecting the economic reality of transactions, the usefulness of financial statements might be undermined.”

After years of mulling a new approach to leasing, FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board are getting no meaningful resistance to their fundamental objective to characterize leases as obligations that belong on corporate balance sheets. However, the boards have faced plenty of opposition to their various approaches for how to recognize the obligation and show the expense in the income statement. The leasing standard is one of the centerpiece projects in the two boards' ongoing efforts to converge U.S. and international accounting standards.