The Discussion Paper addresses the various ways to modernise the Accounting Directives. It discusses both the strategic and technical issues that are at stake and gives the advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches. The approaches discussed are:

– scoping out companies applying IAS from the Accounting Directives and transferring them to a capital market regime
– a high level version of the Accounting Directives for companies applying IAS including only issues that are not dealt with in IAS
– minimum changes required to remove present incompatibilities and to allow national GAAP to converge to IAS
– full modernisation of the Accounting Directives.

FEE continues to hold the view that the preferred solution would be to exempt listed and other companies applying IAS from the Accounting Directives and to transfer them to a separate capital market regime. However, if such an approach to scope out companies applying IAS from the Directives, e.g. for legal reasons, were not possible, FEE’s preferred way to modernise the Accounting Directives would be the introduction of a “high level” version of the existing Directives with only issues that are not dealt with in IAS.

Position Paper