Under the AICPA's Code of Professional Ethics under Rule 203 – Accounting Principles, a member must depart from GAAP if following it would lead to a material misstatement on the financial statements, or otherwise be misleading.
In the departure, the member must disclose, if practical, the reasons why compliance with the accounting principle would result in a misleading financial statement.
[8] The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was created as a result of the Great Depression.
Thus, in 1959, the AICPA created the Accounting Principles Board (APB), whose mission it was to develop an overall conceptual framework.
It also includes relevant Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), guidance that follows the same topical structure in separate sections in the Codification.
While the Codification does not change GAAP, it introduces a new structure—one that is organized in an easily accessible, user-friendly online research system.
The FASB expects that the new system will reduce the amount of time and effort required to research an accounting issue, mitigate the risk of noncompliance with standards through improved usability of the literature, provide accurate information with real-time updates as new standards are released, and assist the FASB with the research efforts required during the standard-setting process.
The IASB and FASB issued converged standards for accounting topics including Business combinations (2008), Consolidation (2011), Fair value measurement (2011), and Revenue recognition (2014).
In 2008, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a preliminary "roadmap" that indicated it was considering whether to adopt or allow domestic issuers to use IFRS instead of U.S.
[18][19] In 2017, the SEC has acknowledged that there is no longer a push to move more U.S companies to IFRS, so the two sets of standards will "continue to coexist" for the foreseeable future.