Comparability is vital to the folks who use financial statements to make investment decisions—but those people may be forced to lower their expectations when U.S. companies ultimately adopt international accounting rules.
A recent study from Moody’s Investors Service took a deep dive into the financial statement of 30 large European companies to see how their reporting changed when the companies scrapped their national accounting systems for International Financial Reporting Standards, which the European Union adopted in 2005.
