Accounting firm leaders, standard-setters and industry accountants called for more certainty in the roadmap to International Financial Reporting Standards.

With the comment deadline having now passed for the SEC proposed roadmap for transitioning to IFRS from U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, accountants and standard-setters are waiting to find out whether the SEC's new chair, Mary Schapiro, will be willing to adopt the plan pushed by her predecessor, Christopher Cox.

"I don't think there is a groundswell coming from Main Street," said Grant Thornton CEO Ed Nusbaum at a New York forum sponsored by Pace University's Lubin School of Business. Foreign investors and multinational companies would like to see both U.S. and international companies using the same set of accounting standards, but he acknowledged that Schapiro "has a lot on her plate" right now dealing with calls for increased regulation of financial firms.

"The Full Employment Act for Accountants would be to have 60 different sets of standards," said PricewaterhouseCoopers global CEO Samuel DiPiazza Jr. He took issue with the notion that accounting standards, such as those for fair value measurement, should be adjusted to make it easier for banks to show more positive results. "I don't think our job is stability, I think it's transparency," he said. "Job No. 1 is to create transparency for the investor."

Meanwhile, anticipation for IFRS seems to be flagging in the U.S. "A year ago we felt like we had a lot of momentum," said Patrick Edgar, an audit and SEC reviewing partner with KPMG. Some of his clients were ready to ramp up their transition efforts back then, but now that there is more uncertainty about the roadmap, they have pulled back and are not investing money in converting to IFRS so quickly.

"They want certainty," said D.J. Gannon, national leadership partner at Deloitte & Touche's IFRS Center of Excellence. "Five to seven years is sufficient time for most people to get through what they have to get through." However, he is seeing more political interference occurring in the process.

Danita Ostling, a partner and Americas IFRS leader at Ernst & Young, sees a heavy cost to the U.S. if it doesn't convert to IFRS. "You have to look at what the economic cost is to us as a country, if we are the outlier," she said. "Where is U.S. GAAP going to fit? I don't see it being economically sustainable." FASB and IASB have been working on a variety of convergence issues in recent years and they hope to have most of the remaining major issues, such as revenue recognition and leasing, settled by 2011, when the proposed roadmap faces a critical juncture and the SEC will vote on whether or not to adopt IFRS. But Ostling pointed out that all of the converged standards so far have included key differences between U.S. GAAP and IFRS.

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