I feel that we have made an enormous amount of progress with IFRS becoming a global
language. We had Europe adopting it first and showing leadership but then
many countries followed, the IASB is now saying 114 countries have
adopted the standards; India, China, Japan are all making good strides in the direction
of IFRS adoption.
So I think we are making huge progress but the big issue is still what is the US going
to do, that's just a question mark we need the US also on board and maybe they
should look at the Japanese example of a voluntary adoption of those companies
that really see the benefit of using IFRS can already go ahead and then maybe
the rest will follow.
We benefited by having IFRS out there, if we moved it even a few years
later and a crisis came in and then tried to move in with IFRS standards you'd have
a wide variety of different ways to it because you're trying to deal with the
effects of the crisis; this was done before the crisis and therefore
you have the ability to actually weather the crisis with having a global set of
accounting standards so I think that's in my mind probably one of the best things about it.
Since IFRS was mandatorily adopted in Europe in 2005 I think the biggest benefit has
really been providing a common accounting language for Europe, which was
the main objective of IFRS in Europe in the first place,
but also if we look beyond Europe at the recent jurisdictional profile that we
undertook where we looked at 138 jurisdictions from all
around the world
it shows that it's not just a European story but that out of that 138
jurisdictions a 114 of them confirmed that they
require all of almost all their domestic publicly accountable entities to use
IFRS and in fact only 8 of those that were profiled don't allow or sorry
don't require or permit the use of IFRS by their domestic companies. But
it's not just sort of what happens on paper I think what's more interesting
for me is the fact that people really see the benefit of comparability and
that was shown in the responses that the European Commission got recently in
their analysis of the effects of the IS regulation where the vast majority of
respondents to that survey confirmed that they had seen an improvement and
comparability as a result of the adoption of IFRS in Europe and
interestingly for me it wasn't just across Europe that made that observation
that there was improved comparability within their own domestic jurisdictions
so I think that's a really big achievement for IFRS.