controversial SME standard
Legislation that forces all companies in South Africa to produce
financial reports using full IFRS has led the country to become the
first to adopt the International Accounting Standards Board’s
(IASB) draft form of IFRS for SMEs. South Africa’s Accounting
Practices Board, which is administratively supported by the South
African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA), approved the
proposal as a Statement of GAAP for SMEs in South Africa earlier
this month.
SAICA project director for accounting Sue Ludolph said the South
African Companies Act, which has been in place since 1973, states
that all companies, including micro-entities, must comply with
South African GAAP, which has fully converged with IFRS.
“We’ve only got 467 listed companies, about 3,600 public interest
companies and about 425,000 private companies that now have to
comply with IFRS,” Ludolph said. “IFRS has become increasing
complex over the years because it has needed to be as it is
designed for… complex transactions for multi-nationals, so our poor
SMEs in this country are struggling to comply with such onerous
accounting standards.”
Insufficient resources
In April this year, the South African government passed amendments
to the Companies Act that allow for differential reporting. Ludolph
said SAICA considered writing its own simplified standards. “But in
a country like South Africa, with our skills shortage, we don’t
have the resources to write standards any more,” she said.
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By GlobalDataAnother reason SAICA chose the IASB framework was because is it
based on IFRS. “This is important for us because these companies in
South Africa still have to be audited. And we also adopted the
International Auditing Standards, so it has to be a robust
framework for the auditors to audit against,” Ludolph said.
The final form of the international SME standard is due to be
released by the end of 2008, which Ludolph said would be too long
to wait for South African SMEs, especially since the international
standard setter might not meet the deadline.
Any changes that are made to the IASB’s draft will be adopted by
South Africa. SAICA said it plans to be very active in the
consultation process and has already submitted a 33-page comment
letter. Ten South African companies are participating in IASB field
tests of the standards.
Paul Pacter, the IASB director of standards for SMEs, said that
when SAICA was in the process of deciding whether to adopt the IASB
draft, it approached him to ask if there would be significant
changes in the final stages that would mean two transitions, that
is, a transition from the existing South African GAAP to the
exposure draft standards, and then from the exposure draft to the
final IFRS.
“Certainly there will be changes in the final IFRS,” Pacter said.
“But most likely, based on the comment letters we have already
received, they will be in the direction of further simplifications,
so it will not be very burdensome for the little companies to adopt
our standard now and then do a second set of changes.”
Criticism of complexity
The IFRS for SMEs draft has been widely criticised
for being too complex and Ludolph said that South African
micro-entities are “still screaming that it’s not enough”.
Additional amendments to the Companies Act are expected within the
next couple of years, which will allow for further differentiation
and the possibility of a three-tier financial reporting system.
“When we’ve got that third tier, we will need to look at what we
can give them, which is even lower than IFRS for SMEs,” Ludolph
said.
Ludolph said that in some ways it is “quite daunting” being the
pioneers of IFRS for SMEs. “What we are having to do is develop our
training material ourselves now, so we are working a lot on that,”
she said. “We have got to have implementation workshops and
seminars for our people so we are going to do full-day workshops to
explain to them how to implement it and then we are probably going
to come up with some further accounting guidance, and so by the
time the IASB gets there, they might be able to use our
material.”
Pacter said he is not aware of any other country that plans to
adopt the exposure draft as its SME standard. However, he added, a
number of countries are working to pave the way for the standard,
including enabling legislation that might be required to let them
adopt the final version.
