Brussels’s impatience with the long-standing attempt to create a single language for financial reporting comes amid criticism of the rules being written for the project.

The US is due to decide this year whether to jettison its US GAAP accounting system in favour of the IFRS norms followed in the European Union and some other countries.

In preparation, chunks of both systems have been rewritten to make them more compatible, or “converged”. However, it is unclear that the US Securities and Exchange Commission will say yes to IFRS in 2011 – or even give a definitive no.

Faced with this uncertainty, the European Commission has signalled to Washington that its patience is finite, declaring that “convergence cannot be a never-ending process”.

Nicolas Véron, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a think-tank, said exclusion from the IASB would be a blow to US influence over the world economy but played down the likelihood of such a move.

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