Improving the National Chart of Accounts for Lease Accounting in Uzbekistan in Line With Ifrs 16

The transition of Uzbek entities to International Financial Reporting Standards has exposed a gap between IFRS 16 Leases and the national chart of accounts established by National Accounting Standard No. 21. The chart still rests on the distinction between finance and operating leases, which IFRS 16 abolished for lessees, and provides no accounts for right-of-use assets or lease liabilities arising from former operating leases. This study combines a normative analysis of IFRS 16 and the national standards with a comparison of the national and audited IFRS financial statements of four Uzbek entities at 31 December 2023. None of the national statements reports a lease liability. The unrecognized obligations range from 0.4% of reported liabilities for a bank and 3.6% for a telecommunications operator to 52.8% for the national airline, whose debt-to-equity ratio would rise from 1.30 to 1.99 if they were recognized. To close this gap, the study proposes renaming account 0310 to “Right-of-use assets” and account 0299 to “Depreciation of right-of-use assets”, and introducing subaccounts by class of underlying asset, including separate subaccounts for green leases and impairment losses. An illustrative case of a drilling rig lease shows that the proposed structure allows the disclosures required by IFRS 16 to be prepared directly from accounting records rather than through year-end transformation adjustments