Özet:

Accounting is the process of recording, classifying, reporting, analyzing and interpreting the fi­nancial transactions. This process is intended to provide useful information about a business entity’s financial status to users of financial statements. In Turkey, accounting is governed by a common set of accounting rules. These are basic concepts of accounting, generally accepted accounting princip­les, national and international accounting and financial reporting standards and legislation provisions. Ministry of Treasury and Finance, Capital Markets Board of Turkey and Public Oversight Accounting and Auditing Standards Authority currently require publicly owned companies to follow these rules. Over time, all these organizations aim to align their regulations with International Accounting and Fi­nancial Reporting Standards (IASs and IFRSs). Since 2001, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) has worked on a set of these global standards. The IASB is an independent internatio­nal accounting standard setter based in London. On 18th May of 2018, the IASB issued a new stan­dard on insurance contracts. This new Standard, IFRS 17 Insurance Contracts, establishes a new ac­counting model and new disclosure requirements. IFRS 17 can be seen as one of the most significant changes to insurance accounting. It establishes principles for the recognition, measurement, presenta­tion and disclosure for insurance contracts issued, reinsurance contracts held and investment contra­cts with discretionary participation features issued. The objective of IFRS 17 is to ensure that entities provide relevant information in a way that faithfully represents insurance contracts. This information gives a basis for users of financial statements to evaluate the effect that contracts within the scope on the financial position, financial performance and cash flows of an entity. IFRS 17 should be applied for annual periods beginning on after January 1, 2021. IFRS 17 shall supersede the previous IFRS 4 Insu­rance Contracts. According to the IASB, IFRS 4 was an interim standard that did not provide transpa­rent and comparable information about the effect of insurance contracts on financial statements. The previous standard also allowed entities to use their national accounting requirements. So, the IASB undertook a project to make insurers’ financial statements more transparent, comparable and consis­tent. IFRS 17 is the result of this project. IFRS 17 brings a lot of innovative and important changes to insurance accounting. One of these changes is about measurement approaches. According to IFRS 17, there are three different measurement approaches: the General Model Approach (the Building Block Approach), the Premium Allocation Approach and the Variable Fee Approach. The General Model Approach is the basic model that is applicable to all insurance contracts and is based on a series of four building blocks. The first building block is the estimation of future cash flows. IFRS 17 requires in­surance companies to estimate cash flow for an insurance contract. The second building block is dis­count rate. The Standard requires insurance companies to use discount rates based on market rates of the same currency, duration and level of liquidity. The third building block is risk adjustment. Risk adjustments should represent the compensation that the insurer requires for bearing the uncertainty in the amount and timing of the cash flows. The fourth building block is the contractual service mar­gin. The contractual service margin is a component of the carrying amount of the asset or liability for a group of insurance contracts representing the unearned profit that the entity will recognize as it pro­vides services under the insurance contracts in the group. According to the Standard, no gains are re­cognized in profit or loss at the inception of the contract because any of contract’s performance obli­gations has not been satisfied yet. For this reason, the contractual service margin cannot be negative either at issue or subsequently. If the contract is onerous, then the contractual service margin is equal to zero. IFRS 17 allows the spreading of profits on insurance contracts over their duration. If the cont­ractual service margin is decreasing, then the losses should be recognized immediately. If it is decrea­sing, then the profits should be firstly used to compensate previous losses and the remaining amount should be recognized. The contractual service margin should be amortized over the duration of a contract. Recognizing the contractual service margin over the duration of a contract should be on a systematic basis that reflects the remaining transfer of services and interest should be accreted to ref­lect the time value of money. The objectives of this study are to introduce the General Model Appro­ach theoretically and show how the value of an insurance contract should be measured, accounted and reported under this approach.

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