Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox said that regulators in different countries should avoid revising International Financial Reporting Standards to meet the needs of local markets.
"Regulators must beware the impulse to develop nationally tailored versions of IFRS, and we must cooperate with one another in implementing a set of standards that is faithfully and consistently applied," he said in a speech at a corporate governance conference in Washington, D.C., according to a report by Thomson/RIA.
Regulators have been concerned about the European Union's push to have the SEC accept a special version of IFRS.
However, Cox cautioned that countries might still want to preserve differences in their accounting standards, noting, "In some cases, convergence and harmonization are the best approach. In other cases, an intentionally different national approach is best; and sometimes simply offering investors a choice after full disclosure is the way to go."
SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins also rejected efforts to harmonize every standard, according to Reuters, as the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board have been trying to do with GAAP and IFRS. Speaking at Fordham Law School in New York, he said he favored a "top-down approach" in which regulators choose a single set of standards.
