As we approach the end of the fiscal and administrative year, we are reminding you with this newsletter of a particularly important and challenging task: the inventory of company assets as of Dec. 31, 2018.
In fact, the provisions of Accounting Law No. 82/1991, require directors to perform an inventory of the company’s assets with reference to December 31, 2018 in order to verify correspondence with the relevant accounting records.
Inventory committee
The regulations in particular prescribe and entrust the Board of Directors to appoint the committee to prepare the Inventory of Corporate Assets 31/12/2018, consisting of a chairman and two members who have economic and technical expertise.
This committee, for obvious reasons of incompatibility, cannot be composed of accountants, internal or external, who keep accounting records, custodians of property subject to inventory, and internal or external auditors.
Function of the committee
The function of the Inventory Commission is to organize, supervise and control the operations directed at ascertaining the elements of assets, liabilities and own assets that form the contents of the inventory (in accordance with the Accounting Law).
Inventory procedure
The procedure for carrying out inventory activities is regulated in Ministry of Finance Regulation No. 2861 of October 9, 2009. We point out the importance given by the regulation to the Inventory List, the main document of the inventory process, in which all assets and liabilities of the company’s assets and their valuation at the end of the inventory must be reported.
In addition, we recommend that special attention be paid to intangible assets, which must be verified both in terms of their presence and in terms of establishing that they belong to the company’s compendium. In the case of patents, licenses, trademarks and other intangible assets, it is necessary to prove their existence on the basis of the ownership titles or any other legal document attesting to the right of possession and/or use.
The Inventory List must be signed by all members of the Commission and made available to the Accounting Department, either in paper or electronic format. At the close of the operations it is necessary to prepare appropriate Minutes showing not only the data referring to the operations carried out (start and end dates, commission members etc.) but also the results of the Inventory and the conclusions of the Commission.
Given the importance of these operations, we remain available for further clarification.
