Cultural - Political Influence on the Mandatory Adoption of IFRS: Case of South Korea and Kenya

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) are inherent characteristics of principles based framework that is voluntarily adopted by a country for communication purpose. This means the standards leave more details of implementation to individual judgements. The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) hopes the world of accounting to be mono-lingual in the future. Today, more than 130 economies have made IFRS their official language in financial reporting. On one hand, the objective of having a one size fit all financial statement being guided by this same adopted IFRS Standards has not been achieved. On the other hand, some persistent challenges are still facing the accounting bodies in connection with full IFRS adoption. The accountants, regulators and various users of financial information must be willing to understand the challenges that exist from across countries to help achieve same objectives. Consequently, this paper seeks to answer two major questions relating to this. Firstly, does cultural-political influence have any impact on the adoption of IFRS? Secondly, if it does, are there some specific cultural-political aspects that could have an effect on the IFRS adoption? Survey method by hand collected data was used as the research design with a case study of two selected countries – South Korea and Kenya. Using one way ANOVA method, the hypothesis was rejected and using the Chi square test, three factual differences arose from the study: (1) the level of enforcement; (2) the language of IFRS; (3) the question of adoption and convergence. The conclusion of the study was that there are differences in IFRS adoption mechanism that has been attributed to cultural-political influences. This study finding shall contribute to financial reporting knowledge that will help to explain some reasons of powerful macroeconomic and cultural-political forces that continue to provide impetus to globalization and use of IFRS.

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