U.S. Progress Toward IFRS

There has been much discussion about the FASB and the IASB and their joint efforts to create a new set of accounting standards. There is also much debate over which set of accounting standards, U.S. GAAP or IFRS works best for corporations in the U.S. and for financial accounting purposes. The following is a discussion of the pertinent and relevant points made by those who are for IFRS, those who are for GAAP, and those who are for a mixture of the two sets of standards. These arguments all tend to fall under one of the following umbrellas: ignore IFRS, adopt IFRS, converge with IFRS, endorse IFRS, and the new approach of Condorsement. While the process of working towards creating a new set of accounting standards has been going on for years, the support from the public and organizations such as the SEC and the AICPA seems to have subsided as other issues have taken top priority. With a change in administration and the financial crisis that began in 2008, the SEC no longer appears to be a strong supporter of IFRS. There is now more of a discussion of whether or not the U.S. should adopt or converge with IFRS. Since the SEC pushed back its timeline of when IFRS will be converged in the U.S., it leads to the question of whether or not IFRS will be required for U.S. accounting purposes and if so, when