When he became chief accountant two months prior, Schnurr received a mandate from SEC Chairman Mary Jo White to get closure on the IFRS vs. U.S. GAAP harmonization challenge, which has bedeviled the SEC for years. Schnurr thought that allowing voluntary use of IFRS might be a good solution, but he was wrong. Now the SEC has little support for providing such an option. There’s continued support for a single set of high-quality, globally accepted accounting standards, but what would they look like? Schnurr will be making a recommendation to White on that score soon. He seems to think some sort of hybrid is possible since the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) have converged many standards.
August 2015
