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It's back to school time.
(From Financial Director)
Byline: Peter Williams.
The European Commission has named 1 January 2005 as the day that Europe's 7,000 stock exchange-listed companies will have to adopt international accounting standards (IASs) for their group accounts. But you knew that. For all those concerned with the introduction of IFRS, preparing for it is a work in progress that will go on well beyond the early days of next January. And most of the work falls to finance directors.
Until the end of Q1 2004, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and national standard setters such as the Accounting Standards Board (ASB) in the UK bore the brunt of the work. The IASB promised a period of calm between 2004 and 2006, where adoption before 2006 would not be compulsory.
Today, however, it is the finance departments of quoted companies and their auditors that are feeling the heat most. At the same time, taking an increasing interest in the proceedings are stock market analysts.
Financial directors may have entertained the idea that by the end of Q2 2004 the IASB would have produced all of the standards in a neat package for companies to take away and implement. Such hopes have not been realised. The major political issue - IAS 39 financial instruments - is due for discussion again on 8 September by the EC's Accounting Regulatory Committee. Some sort of opt-out (carving out some of the paragraphs of IAS 39 dealing with hedge accounting and fair value option) seems likely. Meanwhile, financial instruments disclosures are being tinkered with (through IASB's Exposure Draft 7) and companies can either implement the revisions or wait until 2007. But apart from financial instruments, the bulk of the standards are there so FDs need to concentrate on understanding what the extant 20 International Financial Reporting Standards and revised IASs mean for their business.
In many ways, the adoption of international standards has echoes of millennium bug scaremongering - an immovable deadline that threatened disaster. We all know now that 1 January 2000 came and went with few glitches. But will the same happen in this instance? It is now a given that many companies are lagging behind in preparing for the introduction of IAS, and that could mean 2005 financial statements will ...
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