PwC: Govt should learn from corporate IFRS experience
Government bodies must produce their first IFRS accounts in a year’s time
PricewaterhouseCoopers has warned
government bodies to learn as much as they can from the experiences of the
corporate sector, before implementing
International
Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).
Government bodies have only just learned of this new obligation to produce IFRS
accounts in a year’s time..
PwC said that in particular, government bodies will need to focus their
efforts on specific areas of IFRS which are likely to produce the biggest
changes in the accounts compared with
UK
Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, the framework that much of the
public sector currently uses.
Lynn Hine, public sector accounting technical partner, PwC said: ‘It is early
days and we have yet to see any details of what interpretation the Treasury may
apply to IFRS usage for the public sector, but we would expect the biggest
impact to be on public finance initiative (PFI) schemes. All such schemes will
need to be reassessed to judge whether they should be on or off balance sheet,
as will the financing and financial instruments that underlie them.’
Further reading:
Slimmed down IFRS – but for who?
Daimler postpones results due to IFRS changeover
UK investors write to Brussels over US standard