After years of adding disclosure requirements one at a time, Bob Herz, chairman of the Financial Accounting Standards Board has decided it’s time to step back and take a look at all those disclosure requirements more comprehensively.

Herz added a project to the FASB agenda to establish a disclosure framework, a game plan of sorts for how to make all financial statement disclosures more effective, more coordinated, and less redundant. The project is “not meant to be additive to disclosures, but rather to develop an overall framework for disclosures,” said Herz. “It will look at a better way to organize and standardize disclosures and footnotes.”

The focus of the project is to sort out the network of disclosure requirements for financial statement footnotes, and perhaps look at how it can be better integrated with information in management’s discussion and analysis and other disclosures, said Herz. The objective is to produce a principles-based disclosure framework that will enable companies to communicate more effectively with investors and to help eliminate redundancy and outdated disclosure requirements.

As part of the deliberations, the board also will consider whether such a framework should apply to interim reporting as well as annual reporting, and whether it should apply to private entities as well as public. Herz predicted the board may be able to issue a “preliminary views” document for comment in the first half of 2010.