Whether Mary Schapiro was just craving Toblerones right out of the factory or just needed to cool off after head butting the staff involved in the Mark Cuban case to get them fired up, the Chair of the Commission is over in Basel, Switzerland letting some other Schape-types know that she’s 100% behind “a global set of high-quality accounting standards.”
That’s great and all but why do we keep hearing the phrase ‘high-quality accounting standards’? Maybe it’s our wild imagination but is there a back room somewhere filled with bizarro accountants devising a plan to develop “the biggest set of piss-poor global accounting standards you could possibly imagine”?
Is that why the convergence will take so long because there are opposing forces with their own agenda? We all want quality accounting standards M. Schape unless you’re not telling us the whole story.
SEC seeks common goal for accounts [FT]
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More, after the jump
The survey, by KPMG and the American Accounting Association, found that half of the professors who responded to the survey said they thought a low sense of urgency exists among U.S. regulators to adopt IFRS by a “date certain,” while only 16 percent believe regulators have a high sense of urgency.
Regardless of academics’ pessimism about the SEC getting their shit together and making this marriage of accounting rules happen, the slow integration into the American curriculum is still occurring:
Despite this challenge, 70 percent said they have taken significant steps to incorporate IFRS into the curriculum. In addition, 83 percent believe IFRS needs to be incorporated into their curricula by 2011…Given the dynamics of the current regulatory environment, 79 percent of faculty believe that U.S. GAAP should continue to be taught over the next three to five years, while progressively incorporating more IFRS concepts via a compare-and-contrast approach as the conversion date approaches.
A majority of the respondents to the survey also expect IFRS to be included in the CPA Exam by 2012/2013 and in intermediate accounting textbooks by 2011/2012.
For those of you still cracking the books, discuss if your profs have brought this up and what kind of priority they’re putting on IFRS. We’re not holding our breath for anything meaningful from TPTB.
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