Companies listed in the US will find out tomorrow whether they will have to continue filing statements reconciling their accounts with US accounting rules, as the Securities and Exchange Commission votes on the issue.
The Financial Accounting Standards Board in the US appeared to put a spanner in the works this week, calling for a delay to the move, which will make life much easier for foreign companies listed in the US.
The FASB said that any moves to remove the 'reconciliation statement', as it is known, should only take place when there is a timetable in place to move all companies to IFRS and to properly fund the International Accounting Standards Board.
'We acknowledge the concerns of those who believe eliminating the reconciliation would be premature and would result in a loss of information that some investors find important…the number of SEC registrants affected by this change appears relatively small when compared to the overall size of our capital market,' Robert Herz, chairman of FASB, and Robert Denham, FASB oversight body chairman, said in a joint letter to the SEC.
The FASB believes that permitting choice between US GAAP and IFRS for US companies could lead to a two-GAAP system, which would be unnecessarily complex for users of financial information.
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