The October 3, 2007 edition of The Houston Chronicle contained an interview with Charles Swanson, managing partner of Ernst & Young's Houston office. The story, part of the newspaper's "Moneymakers" series, is titled "Accounting Changing with the Times". In the standard series format, Chronicle reporter Tom Fowler asks Swanson five questions, one of which is "The industry seems to have adapted to the demands of Sarbanes-Oxley. What's the next big change lurking over the horizon?" Swanson begins his response with "One of the big changes that could impact Houston specifically is the use of IFRS, International Financial Reporting Standards. There's been a long convergence between our rules, U.S. GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) and international
As most of you know, the subtitles of my blog and forthcoming book refer to the convergence of U.S. GAAP and IFRSs as "the next big challenge in corporate financial reporting." What makes the Chronicle story striking to me is not so much that Mr. Fowler asked an excellent question as one of his allotted five, or that Mr. Swanson and I apparently think alike ("great minds"?), but rather that the Chronicle story is the first I have seen in a general-readership newspaper to deal specifically with IFRSs and Convergence.
When Convergence literally starts to show up on your doorstep in the morning, you no longer have the luxury of ignoring it. And when your mother-in-law reads about it before you do and calls to talk about it (as was the case with me and the Chronicle story), then you REALLY don't have the luxury of ignoring it.
