Ireland/U.s. While the Icaew Website

Ireland/U.S.

While the ICAEW website sheds absolutely no light about what sort of standards the Irish use in their accounting, thankfully the Chartered Accountants of Ireland do talk about this. O'Rourke (2005) notes that the Irish GAAP was in the process of being converged with IFRS at the time. Price Waterhouse Coopers notes that IFRS has now been adopted in Ireland for consolidated financial statements. Ireland in general follows UK reporting rules. For all public companies, EU standard IFRS will be adopted by 2014 and other variants of IFRS will be required for SMEs, and small companies will be allowed to use something called FRSSE, a financial reporting system for small companies. In general, the comparison between Ireland and the United States, therefore, will be between EU standard IFRS and American GAAP.

One of the differences in presentation between GAAP and IFRS is with respect to restatements or changes in accounting policy. IFRS requires that the company presents the prior three years' worth of financial statements in the event of a material restatement; GAAP does not have the same requirement (SEC.gov, 2011). In addition, there are differences in what line items need to be presented between the two systems, and even in the format of the statements, with IFRS inverting current and long-term assets and liabilities, for example. Another difference is that while GAAP prohibits the presentation of cash flow per share, the IFRS does not have that restriction (Ibid). There are also differences in the disclosure of risks, where GAAP has disclosure requirements that are not included in IFRS. There are also differences in the classification of refinancing of current obligations (for example if a firm expects to roll over its current debt at the end of the period); the classification of unfunded pension obligations; contractual commitments; government grants and a wide range of other areas.

With specific respect to valuation, there are significant differences between the two systems. U.S. GAAP has a number of "explicit interim disclosure requirements that are related to valuation of assets and derivatives." IFRS has an entirely different approach, focusing on objectives, and also encourages the use of "illustrative examples relating to specific events and transactions." The GAAP system is therefore significantly more robust.