So what about accounting standards outside the US? Well, let me tell you something about those. Any country that has a securities market has filing requirements. And those filings have to be prepared in accordance with some set of standards. Many countries have adopted what's known as International Financial Reporting Standards, affectionately known as IFRS. Countries that haven't adopted IFRS might have their own domestic country GAAP, similar to what the US has here in US GAAP. But IFRS and US GAAP are the most widely adopted sets of standards around the world. Now it's interesting to note that many companies outside the US voluntarily prepare their statements in accordance with US GAAP, because they think it gives them better access to the US capital market. So what do I mean when I say that? Well they might be trying to seek out investors in the US. And they think those investors, who are accustomed to seeing financial statements prepared according to US GAAP, might be more interested investing in their company if their financial statements are prepared in accordance with standards that they're familiar with. Let's talk a little bit more about this IFRS, this international reporting standard. The international reporting standards are developed by the International Accounting Standards Board. We have an affectionate term for that too, it's called the IASB. Now how does IFRS compare to US GAAP? Well, there's just extensive overlap between IFRS and US GAAP related to the basic financial accounting topics, like those that we'll be tackling in this course. There's some notable differences with more complex topics, I'll give an example in a moment, but those we will worry less about in this basic accounting course. So are we ever going to see a world where everybody does the same thing? It seems like it would make sense, I mean after all, capital markets have become much more global. Companies can go list their securities anywhere they want to and they can list them on different exchanges all at one time. But GAAP from country to country can vary considerably, so why don't we all just do the same thing? Well, here's the deal, the IASB doesn't have any legal authority to impose standards on any one country. And since it doesn't have that legal authority, it is taken the approach of collaborating with standard setters in different countries encouraging them to adopt IFRS. It's worked pretty well so far, more than 100 countries have adopted IFRS. And it's now required in all countries in the European Union. So pretty successful collaboration effort I would say, but the US has not adopted IFRS. Now interestingly in 2008, the SEC developed this plan for converting to IFRS. Time went by, issues were encountered, and then in 2012 the SEC voted not to recommend that the US adopt IFRS. So why would the US not want to adopt IFRS? Well I'll give you one example of an issue that would hinder the convergence with the adopting of IFRS. IFRS and in US GAAP allow companies different choices about how they value inventory on their books. Under US GAAP, companies are allowed to choose this accounting method for inventory called LIFO, that stands for last in, first out, but that's not important for us at the moment. We don't need to know the details about LIFO. All we need to know is that companies can choose that to value their inventories in the US, but they cannot choose that method under IFRS. And in the US, companies that have been using that method have been paying lower income taxes overtime, because of that accounting method. Now this isn't underhanded technique, this is allowed for all the right reasons, but it has resulted in companies paying a lot lower income taxes, if they use that method. So you can imagine, if those companies had to discontinue using that method, which they would have to do, if they had to adopt IFRS, then they would have huge tax bills that they'd have to pay to make up for those lower taxes that they haven't paid over time because of using that particular method. Do you think they want to do that, absolutely not. So this is an example of an issue that has raised its head when the SEC is contemplating whether to convert to IFRS and it's an example of some of the obstacles that we've encountered here in thinking about that. Nevertheless, and with all that said, the IASB and the FASB continue to work together very closely, as you might imagine because their names look very similar. But they continue to work together very closely to try to minimize the difference between IFRS and US GAAP and converge the two sets of standards as much as possible.
