By Colleen Lutolf, Trusted Professional Staff

NEWYORK—While some U.S. regulators seem to have already boarded an express bus bound for International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), at least one of them—Charles D. Niemeier, a Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) member whose term expires this
month—is not getting on.

Niemeier, speaking on Sept. 10 at FAE’s Current Developments Under Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC and PCAOB Conference, said that what he saw as the accelerated pace toward IFRS is based on a series of “myths” developed by politicians.

“The impression I got and the reaction from the audience was: It’s about time somebody said something about this,” said conference Chair George I. Victor, who is also immediate past chair of the NYSSCPA’s Accounting and Auditing Oversight Committee.

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By Melissa Hoffmann Lajara, Trusted Professional Staff

WASHINGTON—Kilobytes and megabytes could soon be called the filing cabinets of the Internet age. The days of paper-filed tax returns, document-heavy folders and graphite-smeared ledgers as the tools needed to assess a company’s finances are increasingly being replaced by computer applications and languages that require nothing more than a computer and some software. Continue...

By Cara Patterson, Trusted Professional Correspondent

The Securities and Exchange Commission recently proposed a roadmap that would transition all U.S. companies to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) beginning in 2014, abandoning the U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) that CPAs have relied upon for decades. Continue...

Are you thinking about International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) yet? If you answered yes, congratulations, you’re ahead of most American CPAs. Continue...