Ifrs

What is IFRS? Why is there so much debate on whether the United States should use the IFRS? Being an accountant it is important for me to understand the difference between IFRS and GAAP. If you don’t know what IFRS and GAAP are you might be in a different field other than accounting. IFRS, also known as International Financial Reporting System, is a set of international accounting standards stating how particular types of transactions and other events should be reported in financial statements. It is created to make international corporate comparisons easier. On the other hand GAAP, also known as Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, is similar to IFRS in that it is used for reporting financial statements. The major difference is that GAAP focuses on commonly accepted rules in the US instead of worldwide rules. While I didn’t work for the Big four companies like PWC, which bases its standards on IFRS, I still found it very compelling to understand these two standards. While investigating details of the IFRS I found an article that discussed the affects of adopting IFRS in the United States. The article is titled, “Convergence and the Potential Adoption of IFRS by the U.S (Part I),” and written by several authors for the Accounting Horizons which is part of American Accounting Association. The authors discuss the affects of the U.S switching to IFRS. Reading this article gave me an understanding of what my discourse community could look like. I chose this article because I felt that I could relate considering I worked at an accounting company for my last co-op. This gave me a good understanding of what GAAP standards are compared to IFRS.

Hail, Luzi, Christian Leuz, and Peter Wysocki. "Global Accounting Convergence and the Potential Adoption of IFRS by the U.S. (Part I): Conceptual Underpinnings and Economic Analysis." Accounting Horizons 24.3 (2010): 355-94. Print.