The International Accounting Standards Board is an independent, privately-funded accounting standard-setter based in London, UK. The Board members come from nine countries and have a variety of functional backgrounds. The IASB is committed to developing, in the public interest, a single set of high quality, understandable and enforceable global accounting standards that require transparent and comparable information in general purpose financial statements.
In addition, the IASB co-operates with national accounting standard-setters to achieve convergence in accounting standards around the world. Nearly 100 countries currently require or permit the use of, or have a policy of convergence with IFRSs (International financial reporting standards). The US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) also issued on 27 February 2006 an agreement in which they ‘each acknowledged their commitment to the development of high quality, compatible accounting standards that could be used for both domestic and cross-border financial reporting. The FASB and the IASB pledged to use their best efforts (a) to make their existing financial reporting standards fully compatible as soon as is practicable and (b) to co-ordinate their future work programmes to ensure that once achieved, compatibility is maintained. |