The first Statement of Standard Accounting Practice (SSAP) was published in 1970 in the United Kingdom. Prior to this, there were relatively few financial reporting requirements for companies. It was the highly publicised scandals of the late 1960s, such as the GEC takeover of AEI, that brought the need for more extensive regulations and the instigation of a standards-setting body.
The International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) was set up in 1973. Between 1973 and its demise in April 2001 it published 41 international accounting standards (IASs). These were largely drafted by part-time volunteer boards from a wide background of experience and range of countries. It resulted in a rather slow and protracted process of developing standards. Many of these offered a number of options, and thus were largely ignored by the major standard-setting countries. However, problems started to emerge with multinationals having to prepare a number of different sets of financial statements for different jurisdictions. It therefore became difficult to make comparisons across countries for example, when Daimler Benz was first quoted in New York, the same set of financial statements disclosed a profit of 630DM in Germany but a loss of 1300DM using US rules. The International Organisation for Securities and Exchange Commissions (IOSCO), a loose federation of all the major stock exchanges in the world, therefore offered a challenge to the IASC to carry out a review of existing standards to ensure that many of the options be removed and...
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