"... I'm designing T-shirts now. They're gonna be huge. Also medium and small." – Dylan, Modern Family
Some months before the SEC released its report on IFRS that we discussed on the preceding page, the oversight bodies of the IASB, the IFRS Trustees and the Monitoring Board, unveiled a new strategic plan for the IASB – a new vision, if you will, establishing the IASB's direction, operations, governance and funding for the next ten years.
The plan affirms that the IASB's foremost objective is developing IFRS as a single set of high quality, understandable and enforceable global accounting standards. Major new strategic initiatives flowing from this objective include:
- Given the widespread and growing use of IFRS, focusing activities on serving the needs of the countries that have adopted or plan to adopt IFRS.
- Maintaining a network of national and regional bodies involved with standard setting as an integral part of the standard setting process. The idea here is that the network would undertake research, provide guidance on priorities, encourage stakeholder input from their own jurisdiction into the IASB's due process, identify emerging issues, etc. The goal is to reduce the risk of non-endorsement of new IFRS.
- Improving the clarity of its standards and the responsiveness of the IFRS Interpretations Committee.
- Developing a mechanism for securities and audit regulators, the accounting profession and the IASB to discuss ways to enforce the application of IFRS and identify and address areas of divergence.
- Establishing funding on a basis that relies more on long-term fixed commitments from participating countries and less on short-term voluntary contributions.
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