This book will explain the complex inter-relationships between the International Accounting Standards Board (the creator of IFRS), the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the Canadian Accounting Standards Board (AcSB), their work programme and their plans for the future.

Peter Walton qualified in the UK as a Chartered Certified Accountant and in the first part of his career worked as a controller for British and French multinational companies. He also was finance director of a company listed on the London Stock Exchange. In the second part of his career he became a technical journalist, writing on international accounting matters, and an academic. He took an MSc in International Accounting and Finance at the London School of Economics, followed by a PhD. He subsequently taught at London School of Economics before being appointed a full professor at the University of Geneva. He is currently editor of the European Accounting Association's scientific journal Accounting in Europe, and was previously co-editor of the European Accounting Review. He has a fractional appointment at ESSEC Business School, Paris, France as professor and a director of the ESSEC-KPMG Financial Reporting Chair. His academic writing includes many refereed journal articles. His next academic project will be a world history of financial reporting, co-edited with Gary Previts (Case Western Reserve University, currently AAA president) and Peter Wolnizer (University of Sydney, Australia). He is the author of a successful MBA textbook: Global Financial Accounting and Reporting: Principles and Analysis published by Cengage (formerly Thomson Learning), in its current edition, co-authored with Walter Aerts (University of Antwerp, Belgium) He has always specialised in international accounting. His work as a technical journalist has enabled him to work closely with the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and its predecessor body. He has extensive contacts in standard-setting worldwide. He has attended all but four of the public standard-setting meetings of the IASB since it was formed in April 2001 and is jointly retained by the Big Four international audit firms to report on its proceedings. In the professional publishing area, he edits World Accounting Report, a monthly technical newsletter, and International Standard-setting Report, a monthly report on the IASB's technical developments. The third edition of his La comptabilité anglo-saxonne came out last year - an introduction to IFRS and US GAAP for the French market. He edited The Routledge Companion to Fair Value and Financial Reporting, published in 2007 by Routledge. He was retained by a New York law firm (Cravath, Swaine & Moore) last year as an expert witness on differences between European reporting and SEC requirements.