Financial Accounting Standards Board

The profile

The Board writes United States generally accepted accounting principles through the FASB Accounting Standards Codification, which its own exposure drafts describe as the source of authoritative GAAP recognised by the Board to be applied by nongovernmental entities; the Securities and Exchange Commission has treated its standards as authoritative since 1973, reaffirmed in a policy statement of 25 April 2003 that the President's Working Group report footnotes. It has seven members and works by exposure draft and comment: an Accounting Standards Update is not itself authoritative but the instrument that communicates how the Codification is being amended and why, and comments arrive at a numbered file reference in Norwalk, Connecticut. The proposal of 18 August 2026 was approved for publication by the unanimous vote of all seven: Richard R. Jones as chair, Hillary H. Salo as vice chair, Frederick L. Cannon, Susan M. Cosper, Marsha L. Hunt, Joyce T. Joseph and Catherine M. Shakespeare. Its digital asset work began with Accounting Standards Update No. 2023-08 of December 2023, which put certain crypto asset holdings at fair value, and continued through the 2025 Invitation to Comment on its own agenda; the President's Working Group on Digital Asset Markets then recommended in July 2025 that the Board consider whether to treat payment stablecoins as cash equivalents under GAAP, and the cash equivalents project is the answer to that recommendation. The Financial Accounting Foundation holds the copyright in its output.