Commissioner McCreevy talks about reconciliation

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20 Jul 2005

In a speech on (PDF 87k) in Brussels on 18 July 2005, Charlie McCreevy, the European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, spoke about opportunities for easing regulatory burdens in Europe.

In that context, he commented on the potential benefits of the current efforts by both the US SEC and the EC to assess the equivalence of IFRSs and US, Japanese, and Canadian GAAPs and, if deemed equivalent, to eliminate the costs and burdens of reconciliations:

The Commission is analysing the issue of US-GAAP, Japanese and Canadian GAAPs as equivalent to IFRS in the European Union. We are carefully examining CESR's advice on this issue at the moment. There are estimates that for each of the 250 or so European issuers in the US reconciliation imposes a yearly burden of between $5 and $10 million. Dropping the reconciliation requirements on both sides of the Atlantic would mean great reductions in costs for business. Certainly gains in the low billions of euros per year. I will work with the US and with other partners to achieve similar success in the areas of deregistration, insurance, corporate governance, supervisory cooperation and others.

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