IFRS in the General Business Curriculum: Why Should We Care?

Jason Cherubini, MBA, CPA, and Kevin Rich, PhD, and Hong Zhu, PhD, and Alfred Michenzi, PhD, CPA

On February 24, 2010, the SEC reinforced its commitment to evaluating the status of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in the United States by publishing a work plan (“Commission Statement in Support of Convergence and Global Accounting Standards,” SEC Release Nos. 33-9109, 34-61578) outlining the assessment procedures that SEC staff will undertake prior to the vote on formal mandates scheduled for 2011. One of the major components of the work plan involves assessing the state of “investor understanding and education regarding IFRS and how it differs from U.S. GAAP.” Despite this user focus, a joint survey conducted by the American Accounting Association and KPMG in 2008 identified intermediate accounting as the course of choice for IFRS coverage in an accounting curriculum (Paul Munter and Philip M.J. Reckers, “IFRS and Collegiate Accounting Curricula in the United States: 2008 A Survey of the Current State of Education Conducted by KPMG and the Education Committee of the American Accounting Association,” Issues in Accounting Education, May 2009). Given that non-accounting majors often only encounter accounting standards in their introductory accounting courses, focusing on IFRS only at the intermediate accounting level limits the exposure of future users of accounting information to only those students who are accounting majors.