Applying International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and Challenges to Vietnamese Enterprises

The worldwide adoption of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is occurring rapidly to improve the quality of accounting information through the use of a set of standardized accounting rules. In that context, Vietnamese enterprises are switching from the Vietnam Accounting Standards to the International Financial Reporting Standards in preparing their financial statements. This transformation generates both opportunities and challenges for Vietnamese businesses. This research carries out literature reviews and in-depth interviews with some researchers and experts to identify what difficulties Vietnamese businesses are facing in transforming financial statement standards and to propose lessons learnt for other businesses that are preparing for the transformation. Besides, the research also compares a big enterprise’s financial statements prepared under VAS versus IFRS as a case study to point out some differences between the two accounting standards.