Читать книгу Reading Financial Reports For Dummies - Lita Epstein - Страница 20

More companies these days operate across country borders. For years, each country had its own set of rules for preparing financial reports to meet government regulations. Global companies had to keep separate sets of books and report results under different sets of rules in each country in which they operated.

Today most countries have agreed to accept the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS; see Chapter 19) developed by the London-based International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). Beginning in 2002, the U.S. agreed to look at ways to converge the IFRS and the U.S. GAAP (see Chapter 18). The U.S. allows companies based outside its borders to file required reports using either U.S. GAAP or IFRS, but U.S.-based companies must still use GAAP to file their reports. The process of converging U.S. standards with international standards is still a work in process, but the U.S. is now represented on the Accounting Standards Advisory Forum to improve worldwide cooperation among standard setters.