History
In Canada, professional development paralleled that of the United States. In 1936, the Terminology Committee of the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA) formed and was asked to take steps to encourage greater uniformity in the use of accounting terms by its members. In 1939, the establishment of a joint research program with Queen's University culminated in the establishment in 1946 of the Accounting and Auditing Research Committee. The aim of the committee was to improve the quality of judgement exercised in both accounting and auditing and to provide guidelines for communicating financial information and economic facts and for auditing procedures and techniques.
In 1973, the Accounting and Auditing Research Committee (AARC) gave way to two new committees – the Accounting Research Committee (ARC) and the Auditing Standards Committee (ASC). A deviation from prior policy was the invitation to other organizations to participate in ARC work by appointing up to six of its proposed members. The chief aim of the expanded structure is to continue the search for ways of increasing the thrust and scope of accounting and auditing research. In 1982, ARCs name was changed to the Accounting Standards Committee (ASC) and in 1991 to the Accounting Standards Board (AcSB).
For a number of years prior to 1968, the Research Committee issued bulletins on financial disclosure, accounting principles, terminology, reporting and auditing procedures. In 1968, these bulletins were consolidated to form a major part of the CICA Handbook. Since 1968, the Handbook has been constantly updated by inclusion of approved exposure drafts on various current topics.
The handbook is currently updated by a number of groups, including the AcSB for profit and not for profit organizations, the Public Sector Accounting Standards board for the public sector, and the Auditing Standards Board for the auditing sections.
In early 2006, the AcSB decided to completely converge Canadian GAAP with international GAAP, i.e. International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), as set by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), for most entities that must follow AcSB standards. For publicly accountable enterprises, IFRS will become mandatory in Canada for fiscal periods beginning after January 1, 2011. Privately accountable enterprises will have the option of adopting IFRS, or a new set of standards called Accounting Standard for Private Enterprises (ASPE).
Read more about this topic: Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (Canada)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)