What Are The Advantages And Disadvantages Of IFRS

The first benefit of the conversion is comparability. Switching to IFRS would allow people to see various companies from different parts of world on the same plane. As willingness to trade increases, cross-border investment and integration of capital markets are easier with greater market liquidity and lower cost of capital. Investor bases would increase as the financial reports are becoming comparable. With better information, companies would be able to more effectively allocate their capital. Having one standard, however, does not guarantee comparability. With the same standard, practices and enforcement can differ considerably across firms and countries.

The issue of adoption of international financial reporting standards (IFRSS) in Australia has been controversial issue since the first time Australian Financial Reporting council (FRC) announced the policy in 2002. Many believe that IFRSS adoption will lead to great advantages such as enhance financial report comparability, improve quality of financial reporting, attract more foreign investor, and other significant advantages. However, some also believe that the adoption merely result in disadvantages and cost for Australian business, accounting profession and even Australian government.

As the responsibilities of the global harmonization of accounting standards IFRS and GAAP transfer to IASB, FASB’s influence is waning. Advantages of the convergence include high quality financial reporting, which lowers cost of capital for investors and the cost of borrowing for companies. However, there are disadvantages to be noted, such as the costs of introducing IFRS to current and potential accountants and the risk of reducing the uniformity of financial reports due to the lax rulings of IFRS, which promotes earnings management amongst companies. Although arguments regarding the convergence remain prevalent, the completion of IFRS and GAAP is inevitable. Come year 2015, accountants, investors, and companies alike will discover whether or not the pros outweighed the cons; or vice versa.

Access to capital markets in United Kingdom is easy after the adoption of IFRs. Public capital markets play an important role in financing the activities of non-financial companies in the United Kingdom, providing them with the main option to bank loans and private sources of finance. These set of international accounting standards helped reduce the information processing and auditing costs to the UK’s market participants. With the help of adoption of IFRS it is expected to lower information costs to capital markets, and the UK

The U.S is moving toward IFRS (Forgeas, 2008). In the near future, all US company may need to report financial statements under IFRS. This makes the adaptation of IFRS unavoidable. Recently, some large multinational

We now want to look into the International Accounting Standards Board and framework for the preparation and presentation of financial statements. The conceptual frameworks are split into five categories and are in the following order: the objective of financial statements; underlying assumptions; the qualitative characteristics that determine the usefulness of information in financial statements; the definition, recognition, and measurement of the elements from which financial statements are constructed; and the concepts of capital and capital maintenance (Ankarath 11). The standards under IFRS are beginning to become much more popular across the world for several different reasons. The International Financial Reporting Standards are currently being used by at the very least 100 countries and “[was] expected that by 2011, more than 150 countries [would] have adopted them” (Ankarath 1). We happen to find this important because it seems that a lot of countries are starting to adopt IFRS to report their financial statements. One of the reasons why many countries made the switch over to IFRS is because “the decision of the U.S. SEC to allow foreign private issuers to list their securities on U.S.

The IFRS is basically a set of accounting rules which are issued by the IASB based in London, UK. These accounting standards have originated from its predecessor IASC defining the term IAS, which occurred in the 70’s. it was only after 2000’s that the IASB took a strong hold under the label IFRS claiming to be a lot more independent even though pertaining to its predecessor, efficiently staffed and better funded. Caffermen and zeff (2006) discuss about the gradual spread of accounting has made a considerable progress over time, and with the adoption of IFRS worldwide, accounting procedures could be smoothened.

The IFRS adoption started in 2002 with the European Union embracing with the AS regulation, as a way to increase the comparability between the countries and their financial statements. This required the European companies to be listed under the European Union securities market and make their consolidated financial statements in accordance with the International Financial Reporting Standards. Though this not only included the European members' state but also countries that belong to the European Economic Area (EEA); as a way to prepare their financial statements in a consolidated way in regards to the IFRS principles (Deloitte Global Services Limited, 2017). The EU has adopted the same directives in their accounting

With the growth of international business there is a need to standardize financial statements globally. Presently there are “approximately 120 foreign private issuers currently that report to the Commission using IFRS financial statements.” By standardizing accounting practices investors will be able to make informed decisions based on comparability and accuracy of financial statements. The SEC released this statement in 2008, “We believe that IFRS has the potential to best provide the common platform on which companies can report and investors can compare financial information.” The SEC has created a “Roadmap” or plan to convert US GAAP over to IFRS. According to The Committee of

Standardized reporting across firms from different countries would facilitate cross-border investment and the integration of capital markets (Hail, Luzi, et al). According to Beke (2011), Standardization implies the “elimination of alternatives in accounting for representing economic transactions and other events” (Angeloni). In essence, similar events and transactions would be reported in a similar manner, and vice versa. Having more comparable reports allows firms to make better-informed investment choices due to a better understanding of competing firms, which can lead to cost savings. Moreover, firms that have more comparable reports can better contract with suppliers and firms in other countries, and these contracts are more likely to be fully specified and enforceable. Studies also show that the adoption of IFRS reporting should be associated with an increase in market liquidity, as well as a decline in firms’ cost of capital (Hail, Luzi, et al.).

global standard allows them to operate in a single accounting environment worldwide (PricewaterhouseCoopers 2007). The globally positive attitude towards an convergence to IFRS is exemplified by an IFAC survey among

But there a certain limit of flexibility of this international standards for cover with all the differences accounting standard or accounting practices in between country. The IFRS is to increase the comparability of annual financial reports no matter oversea or domestic. This only can be success when the new set of accounting standard published by IFRS and adopting by country when only the cultural, economics, politics and other factors within the country change (Chen, 2009).

In a previous study on the usefulness of convergence, a comparison of firms implementing IFRS in 27 countries matched against sample of similar size and industry firms in the US found, the use of converged IFRS standard by US firms instead of US GAAP led to a more established accounting system with value relevance comparability (E.Barth, R.Landsman, Lang, & Williams, 2012, p. 6). In contrast, Jamal et al (2010) state “The need for a global accounting regulator is overstated. A global regulator is unlikely to help achieve the stated goals of comparability and consistency of financial reporting on a global basis” Based on the joint standard of IFRS15/ASU606 issued, there appears to be a compromise on both IASB and FASB’s part to include and exclude certain aspects therefore, although the gap is reduced, full convergence is far from being achieved. The decision makers at IASB therefore, due to inability to achieve the true goal of convergence, is resorted to undertake a vague position and compromise with the ‘allocation model’ (now known as ‘performance obligation’ model in the final joint standard issued) (Biondi, et al., 2014, p. 29). Nevertheless, in terms of usefulness to stakeholders, the joint standard addresses the problem arising from the original IAS18&IAS11/ASC605

The globalization of markets over the past 50 years has led to the demand for increasingly comparable financial statements across countries. In response to this demand, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) was formed with the purpose of developing a set of high quality global accounting standards. Although a majority of developed markets have adopted the international standards, the United States has not. One reason for the delay in adoption is that many of the standards are very similar. However, there are also several key differences between the two. Presently, the United States Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the IASB have

With complete notion and awareness of how each country has their set of rules, “the goal of IFRS is to provide a global framework for how public companies prepare and disclose their financial statements” (Rouse, 2011). This view is meant to provide general guidelines, as well as international comparisons through conventional and edifying means. To bring broader and vivid objectives, IFRS replaced IAS, the older standards, in order to bring a more comprehensive and simplified accounting procedures.