SEC Chairman Cox sees IFRSs as the single global standard

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15 Jan 2008

US SEC Chairman Christopher Cox spoke on International Business – An SEC Perspective at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants' International Issues Conference last week in Washington.

Chairman Cox's remarks covered three broad issues arising from the growing integration of the world's capital markets:
  • IFRSs as the single, world-wide accounting standard [an excerpt is in the box below]
  • the synergies between IFRSs and XBRL in making financial information understandable to investors and creditors globally
  • the need for globally coordinated regulation of cross-border activities of broker-dealers and securities markets.

Our policy work on IFRS is currently focused on evaluating its potential role in the US capital markets. This is the logical culmination of work the Commission has been doing ever since we tackled the problem of the divergence of national accounting standards in 1981, by instituting the US GAAP reconciliation requirement in the first place. At the time, the Commission thought the reconciliation requirement was a temporary solution, while the real solution lay in reducing the divergence itself. We've carried the mantle of convergence ever since.

That's why our recent decision to accept IFRS financial statements in SEC filings was crafted in such a way as to support the efforts of the IASB, and many other nations, to establish IFRS as a single, global set of standards, and not so many national flavors.

Click to view International Business – An SEC Perspective (PDF 74k).

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