Professor Eamonn Walsh:

International accounting rules are essentially concerned with reporting to shareholders such as public financial reports and reporting performance to investors and other external parties. In general this involves an annual report consisting of a very large document - for a bank this may be 200 pages - which gives much detail about the bank's directors, how governance works, a balance sheet, an income statement and notes to the financial statements. This is not timely information and is produced four or five months after the year end. If the bank is quoted on a stock exchange it will, at a minimum, have a preliminary announcement of its results. This might be a month or two ahead of the publication of its annual financial statements but about two to three months after the end of its financial year. If a bank is listed on a stock exchange it might also produce a half yearly report. If the bank is listed in the United States it might also produce quarterly reports for investors. Investor reporting is generally not very timely. There are time-lags between events occurring and the publication of those financial statements.

Reporting to a financial regulator is the next type of reporting. A regulator is almost omnipotent regarding the information it can demand from a regulated entity. Regulators set up rules which can call for quarterly reporting of large exposures; there will be quarterly reporting of detailed balance sheet information; there will be far more detail than information available to external investors and there might be more frequent reporting concerning matters like liquidity. There are two universes - one is reporting to external users and the other is reporting to regulators, where the regulator sets the ground rules.