تحول گزارش دهی مالی: تجربه از ترکیه

From the viewpoint of a developing country which is in need of foreign capital and foreign investments to finance its economic growth, the need for high quality financial information has vital importance. The need for IFRS in Turkey was brought up by the same reasons as a developing country and as an emerging market. With the internationalization of capital markets and the increased volume of international investments, companies functioning in Turkey needed to provide high quality financial information to access financial resources. Furthermore, internationally accepted and reliable financial information is also needed for the overseas customers of the domestic companies. Another reason facilitating the need for IFRS is Turkey's candidation for European Union membership. This paper attempts to explain the development process of accounting standards around the world and its practical results in a developing country: Turkey. Within this context, brief information is given about the structure of International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), and adoption process of IFRS in Turkey. During this adoption process, Turkey encounters several complications such as complex structure of the international standards, potential knowledge shortfalls, and difficulties in application and enforcement issues. This paper explores these difficulties and shares the Turkish experience from a viewpoint of a regulator and an academician, and discusses the proper and consistent way implementing a “Principle Based” IFRS in Turkey.

Today with globalisation, boundries between countries and financial markets have been removed and mutual dependence has increased. The raise of multinational company activities, economic cooperations and political unifications between developed countries increases the efforts of developing ones to be a part of this global market, which in turn requires transparent financial information. As a result of necessity for good quality information, the importance of accounting standards which are aimed to form dependable, comparable and understandable financial information, recognized all around the world. As the world continues to globalize, discussion of convergence of national and international standards has increased significantly and the need for the convergence of local financial reporting standards along with International Accounting Standards (IAS) has emerged. Today, it is generally accepted that globally consistent and a uniform financial system in a global setting will provide cost-efficiencies to private businesses and greater safeguard to the public. Financial statements have historically been one of the main ways in which information has been provided by a company to its shareholders and to investors considering whether to contribute capital. Reduced confidence in financial information and corporate disclosure produces an investor retreat and results in an increased cost of capital. This reduces the economy's productivity (IFAC, 2007). In 2002, for the purpose of setting a single market in European Union (EU), where the member states could freely trade among each other, and increase the economic productivity, a regulation requiring EU companies to prepare consolidated financial statements in accordance with the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) has been accepted. The regulation that involves all member states has taken force in 2005. With this regulation IFRS has gained acceptance around the European continent but still the countries such as United States (US), Japan and Canada are allowing their domestic companies to prepare their financial statements in accordance with national legislations. As the financial reporting practices of companies vary vastly among different nations, immense complications on prepairing, consolidating, auditing and interpreting published financial statements will remain to be a problem for a while. To combat these complications, many organizations throughout the world are involved in attempts to harmonise or standardise accounting principles and for this purpose International Accounting Standards (IAS), now renamed as International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), are gaining acceptance worldwide (Bebbington and Song, 2005). High quality accounting standards are essential to the efficient functioning of a market economy (SEC, 2007). The harmonisation of financial reporting around the world will help to raise confidence of investors generally in the information they are using to make their decisions and assess their risks (Sajjad, 2006). When we review the developments about the accounting standards in Turkey, it is seen that these standards has been prepared, adopted and enforced under the guidance of the Turkish government. As of today, there are a variety of regulations in accounting area, such as; institutions like Ministry of Finance and Capital Markets Board (CMB) have the authority to regulate their own accounting standards for entities subject to their regulations. However, with the establishment of Turkish Accounting Standards Board (TASB), versatile regulations in this area will be removed and the attempts to provide compliance between national legislation and IFRS will be accelerated. TASB, a legal public entity, with administrative and financial autonomy, currently setting financial reporting standards fully compliant with IFRS. IFRS is mainly designed for large/publicly traded companies. Today, it is also accepted that full application of IFRSs/IASs is not suitable for Small and Medium sized Entities (SMEs) where they hold the largest capital share in national economies. Therefore, it has been a necessity to prepare a simplified and separate accounting standards set for SMEs. To this end, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) has decided to prepare a new set of standards named “IFRS for SMEs” and a draft document has been published in February 2007. In Turkey, in order to create the accounting standards to be applied by the SMEs, with in the framework of the needs of national entities, the TASB has formed a Working Commission in parallel to the activities of IASB. It is planned that the Draft Accounting Standards for SMEs, which are in full conformity with the international standards that the Commission is working on, will be published in the shortest extend possible. In this paper, next section discusses the extent to which IFRS are recognized around the world. The third section, gives brief historical development on accounting practices, and explains the adoption process of IFRS in Turkey. This section details the information about the accounting practices in private sector and the development of accounting standards in Turkey. Section four gives detailed information about adoption of IFRS and the structure of the accounting standard setting body “Turkish Accounting Standards Board (TASB)”. Section five provides information about the difficulties encountered during adoption of IAS/IFRS into national legislation. Section six involves information about accounting standards for small and medium sized entities (SMEs) in Turkey. And, the last section concludes.

As the world continues to globalize, discussion of convergence of national and international standards has increased significantly and the need for the convergence of local financial reporting standards along with International Accounting Standards (IAS) has emerged. Today, it is generally accepted that globally consistent and a uniform financial system in a global setting will provide cost-efficiencies to private businesses and greater safeguard to the public. When we review the developments about the accounting standards in Turkey, it is seen that these standards has been prepared, adopted and enforced under the guidance of the Turkish government. As of today, there are a variety of regulations in accounting area, such as; institutions like Ministry of Finance and Capital Markets Board (CMB) have the authority to regulate their own accounting standards for entities subject to their regulations. However, with the establishment of Turkish Accounting Standards Board (TASB), versatile regulations in this area will be removed and the attempts to provide compliance between national legislation and IFRS will be accelerated. TASB, a legal public entity, with administrative and financial autonomy, currently setting financial reporting standards fully compliant with IFRS. The Accounting Standards Board of Turkey shall be composed of nine members, one from each of the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, the Council of Higher Education, the Undersecretariat of Treasury, the Capital Market Board, the Banking Regulation and Supervision Board, the Commodity Exchanges and the Association of Chambers of Commerce, and two from the Union of Chambers of Self-Employed Accountants, Financial Consultants and Certified Financial Consultants of Turkey (one self-employed accountant and one certified financial consultant). As the Accounting Standards Board of Turkey working on the implementation of IFRS to the private and public companies, banks and other financial organizations, some challenges arise everyday. During the adoption process, Turkey encounters several complications such as complex structure of the international standards, potential knowledge shortfalls, and difficulties in application and enforcement issues. The following challenges occur not only during the adaptation of the standards in line with the legislation of the country but also during the implementation stage. The translation of the international standards is a major challange in the adoption and implementation of the standards. • The international standards are increasingly becoming longer, more complex, and rule-based, and the structure and complexity of the standards are affecting, largely in adverse way, both their adoption and implementation (Wong, 2004). • There is a potential knowledge shortfall with respect to the international standards. Only very few professional accountants have a detailed knowledge of IFRSs and these standards require proficiency on application phase. • In many countries, regulatory authorities try to improve their statutory accounting regulations, and in some instances adopt IFRS as their statutory requirement for legal entities. In such cases, one implementation issue for a country may be the need to reconcile the national legislative framework with the requirements of IFRS, which may include a number of legislative acts affected by such transition (UNCTAD, 2005). • Lack of coherence in the regulatory framework, insufficient legal backing of IFRS as reporting standards in a country may pose significant challenges in implementing IFRS. • And some other technical issues mainly on the fair-value measurement requirements, which have become an important feature of certain IFRS. Depending on the experience of Turkey, to adopt international standards and to ensure proper and consistent implementation, issues that should be taken into account also summarized above. Last but not least, one of the major issues of the mentioned working commission above, is the process for the preparation of Turkish Accounting Standards for SMEs in Turkey. This working commission has been working on draft accounting standards for SMEs published by IASB. So that, views of accounting interest groups on draft IFRS for SMEs are being communicated to IASB and internationally accepted accounting standards for SMEs will be adopted simultaneously with IASB in Turkey. Following the publication of Turkish Accounting Standards for SMEs, it is expected that unity in accounting practices of SMEs in Turkey will be ensured and thus, their financial statements will gain validity in the international markets. In addition, through validating sectoral financial statements, access to financing resources and reduction in financing costs will be ensured, increasing the trust for enterprises in the domestic and foreign markets.