IFRS

IFRS and XBRL: CPA's – listen up

October 30, 2009 General

The last few hours I’ve seen people on Twitter bitching and moaning about two things: XBRL analysis tools are expensive – ie $4,800 per annum IFRS impact on taxes Sheesh. As one of the XBRL for Dummies editors I feel justified in saying that it is the best thing that’s happened in financial reporting for [...]

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Accountants under fire in the US: wrong argument

August 3, 2009 Tax and Ethics

Courtesy of a Tweet from Rick Telberg (he’s a great source of accounting related headlines), it seems that many are pointing the finger at accountants for failing to deal with fraud. In the process however, they’re getting it wrong in attempting to get the US government to back off from adopting IFRS. One person is [...]

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Three little piggies or we all fall down and then what?

May 26, 2009 Tax and Ethics

A couple of weeks ago Jim Peterson digitally urinated all over a piece in AccountancyAge about the Big Four and whether one would fall. In the process, he took a mild swing at Francine and my bet on the same topic. Jim is blunt and to the point. He says not if but when (as [...]

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Jeremy Newman: BDO's cautious maverick CEO

May 17, 2009 Featured

Last Friday I met with Jeremy Newman, BDO’s global CEO. I had been anticipating this meeting for some days. It is rare for a global head of a large accounting firm to meet with lowly, ‘never under opinionated’ bloggers like me. It added a certain edginess to the encounter. I also had the sense I’d [...]

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Attitudes harden over IFRS adoption

May 13, 2009 Tax and Ethics

IASB member John Smith is reported to have said at a recent conference: “If it [US] doesn’t adopt,” he warned, the United States “will be the outlier and those countries already adopting and committing themselves to IFRSs will not accept a situation where the United States remains outside the system indefinitely, yet has a seat [...]

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Are CFO's confused over IFRS?

May 1, 2009 Tax and Ethics

AccountingWeb US has reproduced part of the Grant Thornton study on attitudes to IFRS. The commentary says: “It appears that finance professionals have begun choosing whether they want to be in the pro-IFRS or anti-IFRS camp,” noted Gary Illiano, Grant Thornton’s national partner in charge of International and Domestic Accounting, “and it’s pretty evenly divided. [...]

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New SEC chief unhelpful on IFRS and XBRL

April 29, 2009 Tax and Ethics

Reading in Reuters that SEC head Mary Schapiro …made it abundantly clear that XBRL was very low down her priority list when she spoke at the Reuters Global Financial Regulation Summit on Tuesday, and she hinted that the SEC might allow for delays in compliance, though she didn’t know if that would be necessary. “I [...]

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Understanding IFRS: don't pay CCH's tax

April 14, 2009 General

I received this in email: Learn the ins and outs of first-time IFRS adoption and other key issues — in a timely and convenient audio seminar that you can participate in — right from your office — on Thursday, April 23rd. This practical two-hour audio seminar is the second of three IFRS sessions that highly [...]

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The burning education question

February 19, 2009 General

This from a guest post at AccountancyAge (via PCW) is possibly the most important question I’ve seen asked about the future of the profession: It is clearly not sufficient to limit our learning to a question of increasingly technical methods and standards. This has been the trajectory of accounting regulation since 1970 culminating in IFRS, [...]

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