We are now more than halfway through 2005, the year of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) implementation in Europe. Listed companies in the UK have been building up to this point for a number of years, and yet the effect of IFRS on financial statements still appears to be a shock for many of them. Anecdotal evidence suggests that too many companies in the UK have woken up far too late to the question of IFRS. At the ICAEW's annual conference in June, the institute's chief executive Eric Anstee warned that too many companies were 'disturbingly unaware' of the impact of IFRS on their key performance indicators (KPIs). In fact, the institute's research has shown that only 36% of listed companies had, by June, publicly quantified the effect of IFRS on their 2003 or 2004 financial statements, as they had been urged to do by the Financial Services Authority. All this suggests that the 'head in the sand' mentality towards, IFRS has lingered.
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