The United States is not the only nation moving in fits and starts down the long—long—road to International Financial Reporting Standards. On the other side of the world, Japan is making the same trek, and finding the same experience: A consensus on global accounting standards isn’t easy.
Different organizations have different opinions of how quickly Japan should adopt IFRS. The Japanese Institute for Certified Public Accountants, for example, which has supported such a change for the last 10 years, says rules should be revised to allow Japanese companies with global transactions to adopt IFRS by around 2014 if they so choose. “Japanese companies that mainly do business domestically shouldn’t have to immediately respond to this move,” says Shozo Yamazaki, deputy president of the JICPA.
