I principi contabili internazionali: riflessioni critiche

The paper is about International Accounting Standards and their implementation in Italy and other countries having different cultural accounting traditions from the IASB’s ones. It is out of doubt that the solutions proposed by IASB, despite its neutral international nature, are strongly under the FASB pronouncements’ influence; but economic, social and cultural context in the USA is somewhat dissimilar from the continental European one (and the Italian one, in particular). The paper describes shortly the origins of standard-setting in U.S., the concept of « accounting standardization », the main methodological alternatives in the formulation of accounting standards and the associated problems in their results. Then the paper focuses on the fair value, a particularly troublesome topic which provokes a hard contrast between Italian and American accounting traditional conceptual bases. Finally, the authors share some observations on the opportunities and risks arising from the introduction of the IAS/IFRS in our country.