Graduation Year

2015

Date of Submission

4-2015

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics-Accounting

Reader 1

Marc Massoud

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© 2015 Shoubhik Pal

Abstract

Since the turn of the millennium, there have been various attempts by Indian regulators as well as the government to converge the current accounting system in India (tentatively called Indian GAAP) to a system similar to IFRS, considered today to be the prevalent worldwide set of accounting standards. Indian GAAP has had its fair share of criticism, the most telling being that it avoids the principle of substance over form in various topics in its literature. The first announcement of a plan to converge came in July 2007. While suffering various setbacks through delays in recent years, the current roadmap indicates that certain companies will have to mandatorily adopt Ind AS (Indian Accounting Standards) next year. When assessing the major differences between Ind AS and IFRS to evaluate whether complete convergence can ever be possible, most differences are either avoidable or textual in nature. Three major potentially irreconcilable differences occur in the topics IND AS 19: Employee Benefits, IND AS 32: Financial Instruments – Presentation and IND AS 103: Business Combinations. While it can be concluded that complete convergence can indeed be possible one day, it would benefit Indian entities to have a slow route to convergence in order to maintain a sense of comparability in their financial statements from Indian GAAP to Ind AS.

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