Ahead of the January 1, 2012 commencement date,? operators? in the financial services sector said they expect the regulators to come up with appropriate guidelines for the adoption and implementation of the International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS).
Participants at a workshop organised in Lagos by Standard Chartered Bank, said there was need for the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Nigeria Accounting Standard Board (NASB) and Financial Reporting Council to draw up guidelines for adoption especially during the transition period.
“For example, the NASB needs to provide clarity regarding early-adoption of IFRS, considering that a few banks are already reporting under IFRS in Nigeria,” stated the document from the workshop made available to Leadership.?
IFRS is the collection of financial reporting standards developed by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), an independent international standard setting organisation- of which the Nigerian Accounting Standards Board is a member.
The aim of IFRS is to provide a single set of high quality, global accounting standards that require transparent and comparable information in general purpose financial statements.
The workshop participants also stressed the need for regulators to communicate IFRS implementation plans to operators and the market and also for operators to ensure that detailed line-by-line impact analysis is communicated to the board, investors, shareholders and regulators.
While acknowledging that some banks had already adopted the standards, and others were at various level of compliance, they however called on the CBN and FRC to conduct practical and substantive assessment of state of readiness of each bank to ensure that implementation challenges were identified early and mitigating steps put in place to address them.? So far, only about four banks have adopted the standard in Nigeria.
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