Considerable work has recently been directed toward developing resourcetheories of quantum coherence. In most approaches, a state is said to possessquantum coherence if it is not diagonal in some specified basis. In this letterwe establish a criterion of physical consistency for any resource theory interms of physical implementation of the free operations, and we show that allcurrently proposed basis-dependent theories of coherence fail to satisfy thiscriterion. We further characterize the physically consistent resource theory ofcoherence and find its operational power to be quite limited. After relaxingthe condition of physical consistency, we introduce the class ofdephasing-covariant incoherent operations, present a number of new coherentmonotones based on relative R\'{e}nyi entropies, and study incoherent statetransformations under different operational classes. In particular, we derivenecessary and sufficient conditions for qubit state transformations and showthese conditions hold for all classes of incoherent operations.