Adoption of IFRSs: A Critical Review

Assignment Specifications
Purpose:
This assignment aims at developing student’s ability to critically examine the usefulness of the financial reporting regulations to Australian reporting entities, namely the Conceptual Framework and the adoption of IFRSs. Students are also required to research on another country that has adopted IFRSs in the past 5 years. They will have to do research on relevant literature and demonstrate understanding and critical evaluation of key issues of adopting IFRSs such as the transitional issues, challenges and benefits, and recommend future directions to the national accounting setting bodies.
Required Task: In the body of the assignment, students will have to critically discuss the following issues:
1. The relevance of the Conceptual Framework of financial reporting. How useful is it with examples to illustrate your arguments.
2. Compare and contrast the implementation of IFRSs in Australia and one other country of your choice. The second country must have adopted IFRSs for at least 5 years. For each of the two countries, discuss the following:
i. reasons for the national accounting body adopting IFRSs and when it was adopted;
ii. transitional issues faced (within a year or two), with examples;
iii. what challenges were faced by reporting entities upon adopting IFRSs. (Do not discuss transitional issues here). Include specific examples of accounting standard(s) and discuss the issues that made them challenging/difficult to adopt, to support your arguments;
iv. what were the benefits of adopting IFRSs by reporting entities;
v. the similarities and differences in the adoption of IFRSs faced by Australia and the other country you have chosen. Include what factors had caused the differences you found.
3. Based on your findings, do you think the adoption of IFRSs were successful in the two countries? Explain your answer.
4. Provide two recommendations to the national accounting setting bodies (incl. AASB) on ways to ensure the IFRSs continue to be relevant to users’ needs and to all sectors of the economy.

Solution

Introduction

This paper is about the usefulness of Financial Reporting (FR) regulations to Australian reporting entries, the conceptual framework of FR and adoption of IFRS. The paper critically discusses the relevance of conceptual framework of FR and analysis its usefulness by using examples. The paper also compares and contrasts implementation of IFRS in Australia by comparing it with Canada that fully adopted IFRS in 2011. In making the comparison, the main matters analyzed are the reasons for each of the two countries adopting IFRS, the transition issues faced within the first two years, the challenges that reporting entities faced when adopting IFRS and benefits of IFRS in each of the two countries. The paper then discusses the similarities and differences between the two countries when adopting IFRS and gives recommendations to national accounting setting bodies on ways to ensure that IFRS remain relevant to users’ needs and all sectors of the economy.

The relevance of conceptual framework of financial reporting

Conceptual framework in financial reporting (FR) is a structure of concepts and objectives that aid in generation of consistent set of guidelines and standards (Zhang and Andrew 2014). Before 1929, no group was accountable for accounting principles, after the market crash in the same year, securities and exchange act of 1934 was passed. The outcome was Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) supervising public corporations to safeguard the interests of investors (Mas 2016). Conceptual framework is developed by non-profit making organizations with the aim of establishing a suitable theoretical foundation for the development of accounting standards.………………please following the link below to purchase the solution at $15