US SEC votes to drop the IFRS reconciliation
16 Nov 2007
At its public meeting in Washington on Thursday, 15 November 2007, the US Securities and Exchange Commission voted to allow foreign companies to submit financial statements to the Commission using International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs) as adopted by the IASB* without having to include a reconciliation of the IFRS data to US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.
- The IASB (PDF 17k)
- EU Commissioner for Internal Markets and Services Charlie McCreevy (PDF 84k)
- EFRAG Chairman Stig Enevoldsen (PDF 15k)
Below is an excerpt from the SEC's Public Announcement (PDF 30k) on eliminating the reconciliation:
Having considered extensive and informative public comment on its June 2007 proposal, the Commission today approved rule amendments under which financial statements from foreign private issuers in the US will be accepted without reconciliation to US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles only if they are prepared using International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) as issued by the International Accounting Standards Board. The purpose of the requirement to use the IASB-approved version is to encourage the development of IFRS as a uniform global standard, not a divergent set of standards applied differently in every nation. Consistency of application of IFRS will help US investors who own foreign securities to have better comparability. |
*The SEC has provided a temporary exception for foreign private issuers that use the version of IFRSs that includes the European Commission's 'carve-out' for IAS 39. Such issuers will be allowed to use that version in preparing their financial statements for a two-year period as long as a reconciliation to the IASB's version of IFRSs is provided. After the two-year period, those issuers will either have to use the IASB's version of IFRSs or provide a reconciliation to US GAAP.