Much at stake for global accounting model.

• Author: Heffes, Ellen M.
• Position: FINANCIAL REPORTING - International financial reporting standards

Though the current financial crisis has delayed the formal release (publication in the Federal Register) of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's proposed IFRS roadmap, and at press time, it had yet to be released, it is expected to be out fairly soon. The roadmap is the result of a unanimous vote of the five SEC commissioners on Aug. 27.

As presented in August, the roadmap contains seven milestones that go up to 2011, at which time the SEC will re-evaluate several factors--including mandatory adoption dates. In the interim, many constituencies around the world are expressing their opinions about the challenges involved in establishing a single set of global accounting standards.

Recently, Nicolas Veron, chief development officer at Brugel, a Brussels-based think tank devoted to the analysis of international economics, cited private governance of the International Accounting Standards Board as a key success factor of the global convergence project.

This independence from political and economic interests, he says, in an article published in the Sept. 15 edition of La Tribune, generally "meet[s] information needs of market participants while at the same time remaining sufficiently flexible to accommodate the huge diversity of situations throughout the world."

However, Veron points out that IFRS may be too recent fin Europe] to be considered a lasting success because of two unanswered questions. The first question is implementation--good standards, he notes, must be applied appropriately, This, most would agree, has led to repeated U.S. references to "IFRS as adopted by IASB," as the U.S. would want to prevent IFRS...