From this fiscal year most of the public sector will be producing IFRS compliant financial statements (the Local Authorities have a further year’s grace and don’t need to produce IFRS accounts until 2010/11). That means that the following groups of organisations now use IFRS:

Companies quoted on UK Stock Exchange

Companies quoted on AIM

Public sector organisations (from 2009/10)

Local Authorities (from 2010/11)

Any other organisation that chooses to do so voluntarily

So who still uses UK GAAP? Well, many subsidiary companies of IFRS filers still prefer to keep their ledgers under UK GAAP and file accounts this way. Then there are all the private companies and public companies not in the above categories.

The UK Accounting Standards Board is also currently considering whether to adopt the International Financial Reporting Standard  for Smaller Entities (IFRSSE). A paper was published in August 2009 and the thinking is that this could come in from 2012 or 2013.

The IFRSSE is much wider than the UK FRSSE as the International version covers organisations that:

(a) do not have public accountability; and

(b) publish general purpose financial statements for external users.

There are no financial size limits on who could use it as there are for the UK FRSSE. The structure of GAAP that UK companies would use IF this came in would be:

IFRS for AIM & Quoted

IFRS for other ‘publicly accountable’ e.g. Investment trusts, building socs

IFRSSE Non publicly accountable companies

UK FRSSE small co’s!!!!!

This would be a little bit confusing perhaps for users and preparers alike but brilliant news for training companies like mine. ‘Every cloud…’ as they say.

Steve