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1、财务管理会计外文翻译外文文献International Financial Reporting Standards: The Road Ahead By Langmead, Joseph M,Soroosh, JalalPublication: The CPA JournalDate: Sunday, March 1 2009In December 2007, the SEC eliminated the requirement to provide U.S. GAAP information for many foreign company filers that use Internati
2、onal Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The SEC has also published a proposed rule for U.S. companies to start preparing their financial statements using IFRS. IFRS is effectively in the process of replacing U.S. GAAP in the U.S. capital markets - it has already replaced GAAP for non-U.S. compani
3、es listed in domestic markets, and will soon replace GAAP for U.S. public companies. These rapid developments will require CPAs to retool and learn more about IFRS quickly. Doing so requires an appreciation of why IFRS is of such immediate interest to U.S. businesses and practitioners, a familiarity
4、 with the history and background of IFRS. and an understanding of the key similarities and differences between IFRS and U.S. GAAP. This primer on IFRS concludes with some practical considerations for a company converting U.S. GAAP to IFRS.BackgroundWhy is IFRS back in the news? The FASB and the Inte
5、rnational Accounting Standards Board (IASB) have committed repeatedly - beginningwith the Norwalk Agreement of 2002 - to the convergence of the two bodies of standards on an aggressive timetable. U.S. accountants might have expected that all they needed to do was keep up with the changes to U.S. sta
6、ndards, which, in good time, would be the same as IFRS. If one wanted to keep up with the progress of the convergence effort, one could easily access SEC filings for some non-U.S. registrants using IFRS and review the required reconciliations to U.S. GAAP as convergence matured and the differences g
7、radually disappeared.A passive approach may no longer be realistic. According to a December 2007 rule change by the SEC, many non-U.S. filers who use IFRS are no longer required to prepare reconciliations of their key financial statement amounts to U.S. GAAP. The last reconciliations for many IFRS c
8、ompanies were filed with the SEC for 2006, meaning that the only recent financial information on record is IFRS information. The visibility of those differences is lost. Furthermore, implicit in the new rule, theSEC has effectively acknowledged IFRS as an alternative accounting model for non-U.S. co
9、mpanies whose securities trade in U.S. markets. As long as IFRS and U.S. GAAP contain differences - as they certainly do today there are effectively two sets of acceptable standards in the United States.One might have taken some comfort in the fact that U.S. companies would continue to use U.S. GAAP
10、. But that assumption is in the process of being dismantled. In 2007, the SEC issued a concept release as acompanion piece to the aforementioned new rule. The release examined issues1and questions - and invited comments - surrounding the striking scenario in which U.S. public companies, or at least
11、some of them, would begin to use IFRS as their new accounting and reporting model. This release was much discussed and, after a vote by the SEC,a rale proposal was issued on November 14, 2008 (www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/2008/33-8982.pdf), providing a road map for the full replacement of U.S. GAAP wi
12、th IFRS for all U.S. public companies in a series of stages by 2016.These SEC initiatives put two parts of a widely accepted agenda at odds with each other: 1) a drive for a single, high-quality set of accounting and reporting standards appropriate for use around the world as soon as possible, and 2
13、) continued pursuit of the more complicated and time-consuming process of convergence of U.S. GAAP and IFRS. The fast-tracking of the former is plainly a priority at the SEC, even whilethe latter remains an active, albeit more gradual, agenda item. Unfortunately, the effect of too strong an emphasis
14、 on universality might be to decouple the two dimensions and, inadvertently perhaps, weaken the convergence effort or render it irrelevant.The SECs 2003 study report, undertaken pursuant to section 108 (d) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), concluded that convergence should be a priority, but this con
15、clusion was accompanied by a related overarching point already embedded in the language of SOX itself: The U.S. GAAPmodel was flawed - too rules-based and a more principles-based modelshould be sought as a replacement SOX section 108 (d)(B). The studyreport cited several U.S. standards that rely on
16、strict rales ofapplication, thereby rendering them subject to circumvention. U.S. GAAPwas thus deemed part of the problematic landscape that helped give riseto the debacles of Enron and WorldCom. IFRS was also flawed but, onbalance, both SOX and the resulting study report made it clear thatconvergence should mean a
