The record
In June 2009 the Financial Accounting Standards Board issued Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 168, establishing the FASB Accounting Standards Codification as the single source of authoritative U.S. GAAP for nongovernmental entities, effective for financial statements issued for interim and annual periods ending after 15 September 2009. The statement replaced FASB Statement No. 162, The Hierarchy of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, issued in May 2008, which had arranged decades of separate FASB, EITF, AICPA and other pronouncements into a multi-level hierarchy of authority.
What the documents establish
Statement 168's own text describes what changed structurally: on the effective date, the Codification superseded all then-existing non-SEC accounting and reporting standards, and any non-grandfathered guidance not carried into the Codification became nonauthoritative. The prior multi-level hierarchy Statement 162 had set out collapsed into two levels only, authoritative and nonauthoritative, with everything inside the Codification carrying equal standing. After this date, FASB stated it would no longer issue new Statements, Staff Positions, or EITF Abstracts, only Accounting Standards Updates that amend the Codification and are not themselves authoritative. Statement 168 is explicit that this reorganization was not meant to change GAAP, naming one narrow exception involving a specific AICPA revenue recognition provision for nonpublic entities, rather than describing a general substantive change.
The operating read
As an editorial matter, a founder or finance hire encountering a citation such as ASC 606 or ASC 842 should understand that the number refers to a topic within this single 2009 reorganization, not to a standalone rule issued at that topic's own number; the effective date of the Codification structure itself, September 2009, is distinct from the effective date of any individual standard later added to a given topic number, such as the 2014 revenue standard or the 2016 leases standard.
What to check before you decide
Before treating an ASC citation as dating a rule to 2009, check the following against FASB's own materials:
- Is the citation to a Codification topic number, and separately, when was the specific update within that topic issued and made effective?
- Does the accounting policy note distinguish the Codification's reorganization from any substantive standard change layered into that topic afterward?
- For a pre-2009 pronouncement, has it been superseded, carried forward, or grandfathered under the Codification's transition?
The 2009 Codification changed where GAAP lives and how it is numbered, not, on its own, what any particular accounting treatment requires.
Sources & their limits
These are the existing record’s sources and retrieval dates, preserved from the archive. Source statements, historical events and editorial interpretation are distinct.
- Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 168, The FASB Accounting Standards Codification and the Hierarchy of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles
FASB's own statement establishing the Codification as the sole source of authoritative GAAP, its September 2009 effective date, and its own description of the change as reorganization rather than substantive change.
- Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 162, The Hierarchy of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles
The predecessor standard that Statement 168 replaced, showing the prior multi-level GAAP hierarchy the Codification collapsed into two levels.