FEI Canada's committee on corporate reporting.

• Position: Financial Executives Institute - From FEI

In this issue of Financial Executive, we continue our series of profiles on FEI's committees, which track legislative, regulatory and business developments important to financial executives.

Because Canada is struggling with many of the same corporate reporting issues Corporate America is, it's not surprising that FEI Canada's Committee on Corporate Reporting is just as busy as its American counterpart. Chaired by Mark Walsh, assistant comptroller of Imperial Oil Ltd. in Toronto, with Steven Bower, assistant controller of BCE Inc. as the vice chairman, the committee of 20 actively tracks and responds to proposals made by Canadian business' regulatory bodies. These include the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (akin to a combination of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the Financial Accounting Standards Board. says Walsh) and the Ontario Securities Commission, which is the largest of Canada's provincial securities commissions and is similar to the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States.

CCR meets four times a year, twice face-to-face and twice by teleconference. But unlike several of FEI's technical committees in the United States, Canada's CCR doesn't have standing subcommittees. Instead, the committee forms task forces of four or five people to address specific issues as they arise, Walsh explains. This allows the committee to remain flexible and responsive. "The task-force members study the exposure draft CICA or the OSC puts forth and draft a response. Then we circulate it throughout the entire committee and develop a final letter that incorporates everyone's input," he says.

Compared to U.S. organizations like the FASB, "the access to CICA is relatively easy, and the sessions are informal," Walsh reports. In fact, at the committee's semi-annual face-to-face meetings, CICA members are usually the dinner speakers, so CCR members get the chance to engage in a lively debate with them about corporate-reporting matters and ask questions about CICA's positions on specific issues. But it's not as if CICA and FEI Canada are two oppposing camps. Many CICA members are FEI Canada members, so CCR often can place one FEIC member on the CICA task force studying a particular issue.

Most recently, CCR has been focusing on CICA's proposed foreign-currency translation draft, which would affect how companies calculate gains or losses on their non-Canadian debt. These gains or losses are currently deferred...