It has become rather popular to survey U.S. financial executives and ask them what they think about IFRS-related issues. But I always try to get as close as possible to the raw survey data in order to look for a "key" question, i.e., one related to the respondents' familiarily with IFRS. And from my perspective, I generally don't put much stock in the opinions of people who admittedly don't know what they're talking about.
For example, Grant Thornton LLP recently conducted a national survey of chief financial officers and senior comptrollers in which one of the survey items asked "Do you have experience preparing financial statements according to IFRS?" Only 22% of the survey respondents answered "Yes," highlighting once again the overwhelming lack of IFRS experience among senior financial executives in the United States. As I have blogged before, the inclusion of such a question in surveys like Grant Thorton's is critical to putting many of the other survey results in perspective. To their credit, GT's press release announcing the survey results reads "Majority of CFOs do not agree with SEC on IFRS – More than three-fourths have no experience in preparing IFRS statements" [available here]. However, such headlines have a way of drifting into misleading territory when picked up in the media, e.g., "Most CFOs disagree with SEC on IFRS", which fails to adequately convey the critical finding that most CFOs simply don't know enough about IFRS to have a valid opinion on such matters.
There have also been a few media reports of another recent survey conducted by Deloitte & Touche that asked U.S. CFOs and other senior financial professionals various IFRS-related questions. The reported results were rather interesting, but I haven't been able to find any details about the survey or its results at Deloitte's website, so I'm reluctant to discuss them here, and frankly puzzled as to how and why the media coverage came about without the online availability of supporting data.
