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Accounting for post employment benefits has been one of the longstanding issues faced by Accounting policy-makers. In this article, a comprehensive review of the nature of post employment
benefits plans is presented in the first section. The next section, examines in detail the fifty-year development of post employment benefits accounting standards.


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Summary of Articles
The traditional approach has been based on a revenue expense orient a tion in whih the objective is to accrue yearly
Post employment expenses. This lead to the problem of determining how benefits accumulate with the passage of time and how these benefits should be measured. FASB No. 87
reformed three major areas: Annual expense, balance sheet items and Footnote information. A shift toward the asset and liability orientation is evident with both expense measurement and the new requirement to recognize minimum balance sheet liability for
unfunded post employment benefits.
To its credit, the F ASH did not skirt the hard question in arriving at SFAS 87, though it may have seriously underestimated the liability by not requiring the use of projected future salary levels in calculating the liability.