The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) has announced they won’t be issuing any new standards or major amendments to existing standards with effective dates before January 1st, 2009, in order to give companies reporting under the standards a bit of a breather to get their house in order.
Word around the accountant blogosphere has been tentatively in favour of the break. Maybe it’s my impetuous youth, but I’m not. Full speed ahead, as far as I’m concerned. If businesses are having trouble getting their accounting in line with new standards, then they need to hire someone to help them get it done. Business waits for no one, so why must accounting?
Can’t, however, say you’re surprised, eh? I mean consider the massive inertia surrounding any body of bureacracy, and accountants are like the friggin’ Pacific Ocean when it comes to sheer volume of bureacracy. Change can’t happen *that* fast unless you have a cruel ruthless hand to force it through… :)
My reservations around IFRS are not that the theory is wrong but the execution is abysmal.
Businesses have found it almost impossible to figure out what certain of the standards mean let alone implement.
All this because the IASB are bunch of ivory tower numb nuts who are semi-detached from reality.
People like myself warned them repeatedly about the complexities but hey – gues what – they didn’t take a blind bit of notice.
It was only when the big banks saw that derivative reporting was plain impossible as encapsulated in IR39 that they dropped it. We’d been telling them the same thing for months.
This isn’t an accounting issue – it’s a problem for our regulators who wouldn’t know a business issue if it slapped them in the face.
Ah, now that makes some sense. It’s a shame the IASB is so disconnected from reality. I don’t know if the situation is the same here with our standards board. Maybe Canada ought to slow down our convergence plans. Heck, maybe we will given this new information…