International Financial Reporting Standards

I reviewed this article and found it interesting for a number of reasons:

1)The key underlying theme for IFRS is that it is principles based rather than rules based like U.S. GAAP. An advantage of a principles based system is that a principle can be more generally applied and leaves the specific application to management. A disadvantage of a rules-based system is the proliferation of standards and interpretations as each specific situation is addressed….this is an important thing to consider when developing reporting standards for ecosystem services. Rules-based standards in complex systems are going to be very ‘complicated’ and perhaps literally ‘miss the forest for the trees’.

2) It points out the importance of being able to communicate about complex systems in a global marketplace…and the difficulty of creating practices.