Policy brief

Suggestions for reforming the governance of global accounting standards

Publishing date
12 May 2011
Authors
Nicolas Véron

Public authorities overseeing the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation, through the Monitoring Board in place sinceearly 2009, should encourage the Foundation to make itself more directlyaccountable to the global investment community.

The Monitoring Board should re-examine its own role, composition andprocesses in the same spirit, one option being its enlargement to includeinvestor representatives, and transformation into a statutory body of theIFRS Foundation. The IFRS Foundation’s funding framework should be better aligned with itsgovernance and accountability arrangements.

This Policy Contribution is an adaptation of a letter sent on 12 April 2011 fromthe author to the Monitoring Board of the IFRS Foundation, whose members are public authorities including the European Commission, as a response to the public consultation on the Monitoring Board’s Consultative Report on the review of the IFRS Foundation’s governance.

About the authors

  • Nicolas Véron

    Nicolas Véron is a senior fellow at Bruegel and at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC. His research is mostly about financial systems and financial reform around the world, including global financial regulatory initiatives and current developments in the European Union. He was a cofounder of Bruegel starting in 2002, initially focusing on Bruegel’s design, operational start-up and development, then on policy research since 2006-07. He joined the Peterson Institute in 2009 and divides his time between the US and Europe.

    Véron has authored or co-authored numerous policy papers that include banking supervision and crisis management, financial reporting, the Eurozone policy framework, and economic nationalism. He has testified repeatedly in front of committees of the European Parliament, national parliaments in several EU member states, and US Congress. His publications also include Smoke & Mirrors, Inc.: Accounting for Capitalism, a book on accounting standards and practices (Cornell University Press, 2006), and several books in French.

    His prior experience includes working for Saint-Gobain in Berlin and Rothschilds in Paris in the early 1990s; economic aide to the Prefect in Lille (1995-97); corporate adviser to France’s Labour Minister (1997-2000); and chief financial officer of MultiMania / Lycos France, a publicly-listed online media company (2000-2002). From 2002 to 2009 he also operated an independent Paris-based financial consultancy.

    Véron is a board member of the derivatives arm (Global Trade Repository) of the Depositary Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a financial infrastructure company that operates globally on a not-for-profit basis. A French citizen born in 1971, he has a quantitative background as a graduate from Ecole Polytechnique (1992) and Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris (1995). He is trilingual in English, French and Spanish, and has fluent understanding of German and Italian.

    In September 2012, Bloomberg Markets included Véron in its second annual 50 Most Influential list with reference to his early advocacy of European banking union.

     

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