Remember the Y2K bug? The dreaded computer infection that threatened to bring down the cyber world upon the millennium’s arrival? The infection resulted from the late 20th-century practice of abbreviating a four-digit year to two digits. The looming disaster was to be triggered upon the “rollover” from x99 to x00. Or so we were told and retold and re-retold.

The fact that there were no major Y2K disasters upon the millennium’s arrival helped to vindicate the billions of dollars of Y2K remedies that were sold. Of course, the more thoughtful among us wondered whether the lack of disasters had more to do with the problem being altogether overstated, which brings me back to the world of finance, where CFOs have been led to believe that someday soon their companies will be forced to switch to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

Well, permit me to echo here what I just read in a column authored by Bruce Pounder: “The likelihood that any U.S. company will be forced to switch from using today’s version of U.S. GAAP to using today’s version of IFRS is absolutely zero.”

Pounder, who chairs the Small Business Financial and Regulatory Affairs Committee of the Institute of Management Accountants, explains in a straightforward fashion how work being done in the area of common standards is making the switch to IFRS unnecessary. Despite this, Pounder explains that CFOs remain very concerned — in some cases paralyzed — over the cost and effort “the switch” would require.

Not unlike the many tribes of Y2K fear mongers who canvassed corporate parks at the end of the last century, IFRS has spawned its own army of proselytizers who appear to be rather adept at the economics of fear. ###