The Adoption of IFRS in the EU and New Zealand: A Preliminary Report. National Centre for Research on Europe Paper

[From the Introduction]. The financial reporting practices of companies vary vastly between different countries. This leads to great complications for those preparing, consolidating, auditing and interpreting published financial statements. Furthermore, due to the frequent overlapping between the preparation of internal financial information and the preparation of published information, the complications spread further. To combat this, many organisations throughout the world, such as the United Nations (UN), the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the European Union (EU), the International Organisation of Securities Commission (IOSCO) and many others, are involved in attempts to harmonise or standardise accounting. These organisations support the effort of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) (formerly known as the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC)) to eliminate barriers to investment flows between nations and to assist the efficient allocation of saving to investment on a global basis. The accounting profession, led by the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) and other capital market participants, sees the globalisation of business as increasingly supporting the need for one set of accounting standards used throughout the world to produce comparable financial information (Roberts et. al., 2002)