Convergence of Consolidated Financial Statements Regulations: Are we there Yet?

Abstract

The official debut of the convergence process between the IFRS and the US GAAP standards took place in 2002, after IASB and FASB signed the Norwalk Agreement, a memorandum of understanding in which both parties stated their engagement to develop high-quality and compatible standards, with the ultimate goal of a single set of high-quality global accounting standards. The 2002 Norwalk Agreement was reinforced after the publication, in 2006, of a new memorandum document, The Roadmap for Convergence, in which the two regulatory bodies stated their short-term and long-term objectives for the convergence process. One of the long-term convergence objectives regarding the consolidated financial statements, materialized in joint projects – Business Combinations and Consolidations – can be considered completed after the issuance of the new versions of IFRS 3 in 2008 and of IAS 27, IFRS 10, IFRS 11 and IFRS 12 in 2011. But are we there yet? Given that the accounting convergence process had become, for some time now, one of the most debated and challenging issues for practitioners, regulators and researchers, we show the same special interest in the research undertaken. The main purpose of this paper is to establish the level of convergence between the two most representative sets of accounting standards applicable to entities in the private sector. Unlike previous studies carried out on this topic, which measure the general accounting harmonization for private sector, our study focuses on a specific issue, namely the formal accounting harmonization between IFRS and US GAAP regulations regarding consolidated financial statements. The research methodology used for achieving our objective was based on some statistical tools, such as correlation and/or association coefficients. The result reveals that IFRS have substantially converged with US GAAP, at least in the area of consolidated financial reporting, but there still exist some differences between the two referentials.