SEC IFRS Roundtable Agenda and Panelists are Announced: Even Worse News than I Expected

This is a short follow-up to yesterday's post on the upcoming SEC Roundtable on International Financial Reporting Standards.

As I feared, the agenda is not even on the same planet as the core questions, indicating ever more strongly that the fix is in. Of the panelists, I know two of them (good things), and know a little something about one other (a bad thing).

Of the two panelists I know, the more outspoken is Gaylen Hansen, director at large of the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) and partner at accounting firm EKS&H. Gaylen was the first, even before the SEC, to go public with an analysis of the constituent feedback from the SEC's Roadmap proposal. He did it at a NASBA convention, and I wrote about it here:

"The problem for … IFRS supporters is that the data is so darn unequivocal against the IFRS Roadmap proposal that any errors due to small sample size would have to be tsunami-sized in order to reverse the results. Public companies disfavor the Roadmap by a margin of exactly 2:1; and the public companies that express "strong" opposition to the Roadmap proposal outnumber all supporters, however strong, by exactly 1.5:1. Perhaps even more damning to the Roadmap proposal is that not a single investor group expresses "strong" support, and the overwhelming majority want to tear it up." [Just to be clear, I am quoting myself.]

I'm guessing that the SEC felt they had no choice but to ask NASBA to provide a panelist, and bless NASBA's little hearts, they picked Gaylen. I know he has a lot to say about IFRS, and for me, the only drama remaining is whether he will actually be given a chance to say it.

I Don't Know this Guy, But I Think I Know What He's Going to Say…

The panelist I know of by reputation only is Bill Yeates, partner at Hein & Associates. The SEC's brief description of him doesn't mention that he is a past member of both the SEC Regulations and Professional Prace Executive Committees for the Center for Audit Quality (CAQ). For that reason alone, I suspect that he was handpicked by the AICPA, and will as a matter of course shill for them.

Mr. Yeates is on the "smaller public companies" panel, and I find it amazing that the SEC refuses to recognize that CPAs have a built-in conflict of interest on any IFRS policy question. Moreover, regardless of the size of the issuer, the SEC should be focusing on the financial statement user, and not the financial statement supplier. How are these panelists supposed to tell us about "…financial statement users and their needs," as listed in the agenda, if not one is actually a financial statement user?

The Token Investor Issues

Here are the issues that the first panel, entitled "Investor Understanding and Knowledge of IFRS" are supposed to address:

• U.S. investors' current knowledge of IFRS and preparedness for potential incorporation
• How and when U.S. investors educate themselves on changes in accounting standards
• Extent, logistics, and timing necessary to undertake changes to improve investor understanding of IFRS
• Potential methods of incorporation

These topics aren't even on the same planet with the core questions that the SEC has been avoiding for years (I know, I'm repeating myself):

• Do investors perceive that IFRS gives them higher quality information than U.S. GAAP?
• Is there any hope that financial statements will become more comparable across issuers over time by continuing to work with IFRS?

And, please tell me how this handpicked panel, which purportedly can represent investors' interests in the IFRS policy decision, is competent to evaluate the "potential methods of incorporation"?

* * * * * * *

And, tell me again why, two years after the Roadmap proposal's comment letters were tabulated and analyzed we are still wasting time on this? It should be said that a couple of commenters to my blog post on Gaylen's analysis found fault because one form or another of non-response bias could have skewed the results. There is a lot of validity to that, but there are ways to investigate the degree to which non-response bias accounted for the findings. The SEC has had two years to follow up on the comments from the Roadmap proposal, but of course, they have done nothing – because, I'm thinking they were thinking that they couldn't control the results.

A "roundtable," on the other hand, can be controlled. Even though it may not be possible to handpick each panelist, a watered-down agenda with very little time for each panelist to say their peace is likely to do the trick.

An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Bill Yeates is a CAQ board member.  I regret the error and apologize to Mr. Yeates.