IASB Chairman Hans Hoogervorst outlined the progress of improvements to the IFRSs and further changes. He also talked about how the last 12 months have seen a rise in interest in IFRS among the major Asian economies and described how the US has become increasingly ‘bilingual’ in financial reporting.
Hoogervorst talked about the near-completion of the decade-long programme of convergence with the US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), which has delivered improved standards for revenue recognition and leases. He said the joint work on the Revenue Standard had been a success that few would have thought possible 10 years ago, resulting in companies all over the world using the same Standard for reporting their top-line results.
Speaking about the continued expansion of IFRS Standards around the world, Hoogervorst pointed out the encouraging developments in the three biggest Asian economies;
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China—the Chinese Ministry of Finance and the IFRS Foundation have just announced that they will explore further steps to advance the use of IFRS within China, especially for internationally-oriented Chinese companies;
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India—which will move to Ind AS next year, a set of standards based on and substantially converged with IFRS Standards; and
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Japan—where the number of Japanese companies voluntarily adopting IFRS Standards has more than tripled in the last two years.
Hoogervorst commented:
For preparers that use IFRS Standards, the world is increasingly becoming a monolingual place. Even for US investors and companies, the replacement of national standards around the world by IFRS is huge progress.
We know that the next several years are unlikely to bring significant progress towards domestic use of IFRS in the United States. Still, there are substantive American interests at stake. IFRS Standards strip out significant costs for American investors, multinational preparers and global accounting networks. More generally, the US has a big interest in a strong infrastructure for the global economy, of which IFRS is an important part.
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