February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
“Today’s announcement is a sign of our common interest in reducing regulatory burden and related costs on business,” McCreevy, who until recently was Ireland’s former minister for finance, said.
The agreement allows companies in the EU to use the European recognized International Financial Reporting Standards and no longer have to adapt to special U.S. standards by 2009.
“As a former practicing accountant, I know only too well the costs faced by companies who have to file separate accounts in the EU and the U.S.,” he said. The former Kildare TD was an accountant before entering the Dail in 1977.
Following several high-profile accounting scandals, such as that at Enron, the U.S. implemented tighter corporate reporting and accountability rules. Many European companies have complained that the stricter regulations cost too much, and that Europe’s vigorous corporate-reporting regulations already addressed those concerns.
The agreement will eliminate the need for European companies to apply two sets of accounting standards as previously mandated by the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission.
“Since the market place is global we ideally need regulations and standards that are global as well,” McCreevy said.
Meanwhile, the previous week, the minister for agriculture and food, Mary Coughlan TD, came to the U.S. for an eight-day tour to promote the use of Irish-developed and -manufactured food supplements and to meet with her U.S. counterpart, Secretary of Agriculture Michael Johanns.
“This is about the high-tech side of nutrition which we are doing a lot of development on in Ireland,” Coughlan said during a small reception at the residence of Irish Ambassador Noel Fahey in Washington.
She said more research is needed, especially in the U.S. dairy industry, in pro-biotics and pre-biotics supplements that are designed to strengthen the human immune system.
Coughlan said much of the effort focused on children’s nutrition.
“It may be something quite strange to American culture where we encourage pro-biotics where you take a bacteria into your body and use that bacteria,” she said. “That may be a bit alien to Americans at the moment, but it’s very much a European concept.
“We’ve discovered in our research new enhancers within food that would be very, very supportive to children’s nutrition and especially children born with low birth weight.”
Coughlan was accompanied by executives from Bord Bia and the Irish Dairy Board and with the senior management of Kerry Bio-Sciences America and other U.S. subsidiaries of Kerry Group plc and of Glanbia, the Carbery Group, Lakeland and Cuisine de France.