You are elated to have landed the summer job of your dreams as an accounting intern with

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Question:

You are elated to have landed the summer job of your dreams as an accounting intern with Wheaton Corporation, a company providing fertilizer and farm products to Canadian farmers. Your supervisor and mentor, Mr. B. Kount greets you with a tough assignment on your first day of work. He handed over a sheet containing some hastily scribbled notes and commented, “I wish to start you off with something light and easy.

Here are some notes on our pension fund operations for 2017. Could you please sort this out by the end of the day? And did I tell you our firm is currently with ASPE but considering a switch to IFRS in 2021?”

The note contained the following information:

a. Beginning projected benefit obligation (PBO), $568,000. The plan is underfunded by 60% of this amount and the regulatory agencies consider this to be quite heavily underfunded.

b. Past service costs were recorded on January 1, 2017 (? To be determined by the Intern). The current service costs for 2017 amounted to $140,000.

c. The plan uses an interest rate of 8%. We recorded an interest expense of $52,240 for 2017.

d. Our investments of the plan assets did very poorly earning only $13,178 on our plan assets in 2017.

e. The corporate pension committee overseeing the plan operations had decided to fund an amount of $35,000 in addition to our normal annual contributions which we make as per our corporate policy. The company normally contributes 5% of the PBO carried forward from 2016 plus 50% of the current service costs and 60% of any past service costs incurred during the year.

f. Employees funded $20,000 to the plan as it is a contributory pension plan.

g. Benefit payments for the year, $74,000.

h. It was determined by the firm’s actuaries that the ending balance of the plan assets appropriately reflected their fair market values.

i. The projected benefit obligation was revalued at the end of the year and should reflect a $50,000 reduction in the PBO otherwise determined.

REQUIRED:

A little while later, while you were still sorting things out, B. Kount arrives at your solid oak wood desk and gave you some more specific instructions/queries.

1. Give me a summary of the activities, showing them on a worksheet per ASPE.

2. And oh yes, prepare the entries that are required for us to record all of these activities.

3. I wonder whether pension expenses could have been any different if we had been with IFRS? What would have been the amount? Please give me some brief details of how you came up with that number.