Andreas got more mail!

As an important public service, carried out here without regard for my personal safety, we present another selection of correspondence to and from the office of IASB Chair Andreas Barckow, courtesy of my mole at the IFRS Foundation, another brave fighter for transparency. Please destroy after reading: Dear Mr. Barckow – just writing in interest…

Rumour mill #2!

A couple of years ago, inspired by a reported rumour about the origins of IAS 1 – one commentator called it “one of many ill-informed myths which ignores the realities of the world and, in particular, standard setting”- I had some fun making up my own IFRS-related rumours, in the hope that some of them…

The apolitical nature of standard-setting, or: push back now!

Armand Capisciolto, Chair of Canada’s Accounting Standards Board, recently returned to the topic of politics in standard-setting… Here are some extracts: As we covered here, Capisciolto had covered related matters just seven months earlier, noting then: Plainly the topic is on his mind (maybe even more than baseball!), and although he doesn’t specify what prompted…

More on WH Smith: robust remediation ahead!

We looked here at the following announcement by the retailer WH Smith PLC: The company announced at the time that the Board had “instructed Deloitte to undertake an independent and comprehensive review.” The company has now issued a summary of the review:  It announced the following “remediation actions”: At the same time, the company announced…

Reexamining foreign company rules, or: is it broke, should we fix it?

The Securities and Exchange Commission recently issued a concept release on foreign private issuer eligibility. Qualifying foreign companies listing in the US (termed “foreign private issuers”) receive various exemptions from the rules applying to domestic US companies, including the ability to file their statements in compliance with IFRS rather than with US GAAP. The concept…