Voices

IASC Foundation Chair Concerned About U.S. Support

Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, the recently appointed chairman of the board of trustees of the International Accounting Standards Committee Foundation, which oversees the International Accounting Standards Board, is worried about the U.S. backing out of the convergence effort.

“The aspiration of having global standards depends very much on the adoption of global standards by the United States, and this is highly uncertain and may still give us a big disappointment in a year or so from now,” he said, according to Accountancy Age.

Indeed, the Securities and Exchange Commission won’t even decide until the middle of next year whether to definitely proceed with plans for incorporating International Financial Reporting Standards. In the meantime, some of the deadlines in the convergence effort have been slipping as organizations in the U.S. ask for more time to digest and respond to all the new exposure drafts of converged standards that will be coming out from the IASB and the U.S.’s Financial Accounting Standards Board each quarter.

That leaves the question of whether the U.S. will ultimately adopt IFRS still open, an unsettling state of affairs for countries that have already accepted the global standards.

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