Ten Years of Mandatory Use of IFRS in the European Union: A Status Report

摘要

This article reports on the result, 10 years later, of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption choices allowed under the EU's Regulation No. 1606/2002 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 July 2002 on the Application of International Accounting Standards. The regulation, which took effect in 2005, allowed country-level variations in the completeness, timing, and scope of implementation. We provide a background of the implementation choices that the regulation allowed, and report the choices made by individual EU member states. Next, because significant differences in the extent of IFRS implementation exist, we use the European Commission's most recent IFRS implementation data to provide an up-to-date analysis of which countries actually can be considered similar with respect to their accounting practice.