With nearly 120 countries having already adopted or agreed to adopt International Financial Reporting Standards, U.S. firms and practitioners have accepted the when-not-if scenario regarding IFRS convergence - but most report making preparations to the principles-based guidelines at a measured pace.

Though the roadmap to the adoption of IFRS awaits official approval, CPA firms are implementing varying degrees of in-house training and client education programs, while vendors are cobbling together CPE training and handbooks to ease the inevitable transition process.

Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission, which initially proposed its IFRS convergence roadmap in August 2008 under former Chairman Christopher Cox, has been criticized for what has been perceived as tepid and sporadic support of that timeline under new chair Mary Schapiro - a process that would have required U.S. issuers to begin reporting in IFRS in 2014.

"I don't think it's as much negative feeling as ambivalence on the SEC's part," opined Ken Marshall, the IFRS markets leader at Big Four firm Ernst & Young. "They had the Madoff scandal, then the financial crisis to deal with. Add to that, you didn't have a chief accountant appointed until August."

The SEC's recently appointed chief accountant, James Kroeker, said late last year that the regulator would return its attention to the IFRS roadmap, but stressed that both the International Accounting Standards Board and the Financial Accounting Standards Board should not wait for the SEC to make a decision on the final roadmap, and how the roadmap might ultimately change.

Both FASB Chairman Robert Herz and IASB Chairman Sir David Tweedie have maintained that their organizations aim to converge U.S. GAAP with IFRS by June 2011, a date that also was recommended by world leaders at the 2009 G-20 summit held last summer in Pittsburgh.

The SEC had been scheduled to make a definitive announcement on IFRS prior to the end of 2009, but didn't.

At E&Y, Marshall said that the firm has implemented a continuing IFRS "bridge education" program for audit and assurance professionals trained in GAAP, as well as helping explain to clients the differences between GAAP and IFRS, as the Big Four firm awaits an official determination.

"We have not accelerated the training, as we're not going to run any more people through than we have to," he said. "We're not really going to spend millions on educating 30,000 assurance professionals. We can always ramp up [the training] if we need to."

Troy Barton, a partner in the performance and finance group at consulting giant Accenture, said that his unit's IFRS training work consists of "helping clients translate policy decisions and the options around them that they would make. For our clients, the question is, how big is the impact and how do we help them prepare?"

As an example of some of the inherent problems with regard to conversion, he recently met with the finance and IT departments at three clients that operate roughly 40 different financial systems.

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