ICASL to host the South Asian Regional Standard-Setters Meeting

Two world leaders in the field of international accounting standards will be in Sri Lanka this month for a top level regional meeting to be hosted by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Sri Lanka (ICASL), the country's apex national accountancy body.

Professor Sir David Tweedie, Chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and Board Member, Warren McGregor will hear presentations in Colombo from the National Accounting Standard setters of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka at this day-long meeting on November 24.

These presentations will focus on the current status of each country's effort to adopt International Accounting Standards (IASs) and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs), the challenges they face and the steps taken by countries affiliated to the South Asian Federation of Accountants (SAFA) for adoption of these International Standards.

"The South Asian Regional Standard-Setters Meeting is one of the most important events for our part of the world in the process of moving to a single set of global accounting standards," ICASL President, Nishan Fernando said.

"The ICASL, as the SAFA Centre for Excellence for Standards and Quality is proud to host this milestone conference."

He said the meeting would help the International Accounting Standards Board to evaluate the progress made by countries in the region in moving to international accounting standards and generate valuable discussion on technical and other issues faced by countries in the region. The expectations of SAFA countries from the IASB and the Board's responses would significantly take the process forward, Fernando added.

Reyaz Mihular, Chairman of SAFA Accounting and Auditing Standards Committee said a key matter of debate at the meeting would be new trends in Financial Reporting Standards. "International Financial Reporting Standards are increasingly moving to fair value measurement of Assets and Liabilities as a consequence of the current trend to fully portray the economic consequences of an entity's performance," he explained.

"This trend poses several challenges to countries in the South Asian region where we do not have active markets to support such fair valuations. We will address challenges such as this at our meeting."

The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), based in London was set up in 2001 to develop a single set of high quality, global accounting standards that require transparent and comparable information in general purpose financial statements. In pursuit of this objective, the IASB cooperates with national standard-setters to achieve convergence in accounting standards around the world.

Towards this end, the IASB encourages the holding of Regional Standard Setters Conferences as a means of understanding and supporting the convergence efforts of countries across the world. At the last SAFA Assembly, it was agreed that such Regional Standard Setters Conferences be held as an annual event in the SAFA countries on a rotational basis."