SEC Chairman Christopher Cox released the long-awaited roadmap to international financial reporting standards, or IFRS, last week. Fellow accounting blogger Rick Telberg has a great summary of comments from lots of sources on his post titled, “SEC unwraps ‘roadmap’ to IFRS: GAAP is dead, long live IFRS.” I found the blog post by the Arizona State WP Carey School interesting. It refers to the cost of complying with GAAP versus the simpler version of IFRS. They also give an excellent perspective from the accounting educator’s point of view.

Here is the link to the official SEC announcement, in which Cox calls IFRS the lingua franca of the global business community. He is correct. With more than 100 countries adopting IFRS and about 85 that require it for their domestic filers, it would be a real stretch to think we could convince the world that U.S. GAAP should be the “gold standard.”

As I understand it, the SEC sets a deadline of 2011 for the final go/no-go decision. The major deadline appears to be 2014 (as we predicted), with the possibility of a much quicker deadline for large filers. There was a hint that some public companies could convert to IFRS beginning next year at their option. The full “roadmap” has yet to be released, but you get the idea from this background.

See our coverage on our Web site here, including links to our courses to help you prepare to meet the challenge of converting to IFRS. We have already held several webcasts and lined up several internationally renowned consultants and speakers to help us prepare programming to maske sure our members are prepared.

We are working with the Florida Institute of CPAs and the Ohio Society of CPAs to put on an International Conference to cover the latest developments on this for both public and private companies and their auditors on Oct. 22-23, 2008 in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.