Now that the Securities and Exchange Commission has unveiled its timeline to adopt International Financial Reporting Standards, financial reporting executives are getting an earful on how they can assess the effect of such a change and develop a strategy to get it done.
Already, Webcasts and executive forums are warning companies not to rush into such a dramatic shift. While the SEC has said it may allow a select number of the largest U.S. companies to adopt IFRS as soon as 2010, experts agree most companies will be hard-pressed to do even that, having no definitive deadline to follow. “[W]e believe that it’s actually quite unlikely that a meaningful number of U.S. issuers will elect to early adopt until the SEC revisits the roadmap and sets a mandatory deadline in 2011,” Dave Kaplan, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said during a Nov. 20 Webcast.
