ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses the significant international influence of US GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles), where other countries and business enterprises choose to follow the US lead. US GAAP remains as a potential global accounting system to rival International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS Standards). The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been imitated in many countries, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) provides a model for an independent standard-setting body, and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has set out regulation of corporate governance with a wide-ranging global impact, even though a crisis of domestic confidence made it necessary. There is no active project for the FASB and SEC to work further with the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) towards ‘converging’ the two systems. When analysing the annual corporate reports of US companies it is essential to examine the full package of annual report, Form 10-K and proxy statement. Although the requirement for foreign private issuers to provide a reconciliation from IFRS Standards to US GAAP ceased in 2007, there is still considerable scope for researchers to investigate the annual reports of foreign private issuers in the US and to extract evidence from SEC staff publications.
