The Financial Accounting Standards Board voted unanimously to formally add a project to its agenda to "comprehensively reconsider" the current rules on lease accounting. Critics say those rules, which haven't gotten a thorough revision in 30 years, make it too easy for companies to keep their leases of real estate, equipment and other items off their balance sheets.

As such, FASB members said, they're concerned that financial statements don't fully and clearly portray the impact of leasing transactions under the current rules.

"I think we have received a clear signal from the investing community that current accounting standards are not providing them with all the information they want," FASB member Leslie Seidman said before the vote.

FASB's revamp could lead to companies being required to consolidate more of their leases on the balance sheet. Bear Stearns & Co. accounting analysts predicted in a March report that "most, if not all" leases would ultimately have to be added to the balance sheet.

If that happens, the effects could be vast. Some observers have estimated that companies may have $1 trillion or more in off-balance-sheet leases. And since payment obligations under those leases are akin to debt, adding leases to the balance sheet would effectively increase companies' reported debt load.

Any changes will take a while, however. The board doesn't expect to issue its preliminary views on any changes until 2008, when it plans to issue a lease-accounting discussion paper, to be followed by a formal draft rule putting forth proposed changes. FASB Chairman Robert Herz said on a conference call after the vote that he would expect a final rule to come in 2009 at the earliest.

The lease-accounting project will be a joint effort between FASB and its international counterpart, the International Accounting Standards Board, which also voted Wednesday to begin a lease-accounting revamp. The two boards will form a joint working group to start looking into leasing issues, and the discussion paper will describe both boards' views on the matter.

A change in lease-accounting rules would affect a wide spectrum of companies - from big retailers, who lease real estate at thousands of locations, to airlines, which lease planes, aircraft equipment and airport facilities.

The move to overhaul lease accounting was prompted in part by the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which issued a report last year recommending the move and contending that many companies structure their leases so as to avoid putting them on the balance sheet. In many cases, even small changes in the terms of a lease can make the difference between the lessee classifying it as a "capital" lease, which must be on the balance sheet, and an "operating" lease, which doesn't have to be.

-- MICHAEL RAPOPORT (Dow Jones Newswires)