There's serious talk that the US will adopt International Financial Reporting Standards, which would seriously alter how you report assets; so, yesterday, we visited a breakfast at BDO Seidman to hear more. BDO's Wendy Hambleton says there's lots of good reasons to adopt the IFRS, including that teaching multiple sets of accounting standards around the world would be confusing. By the way, the current US accounting standard is called the US Generally Accepted Accounting Practice (we vote to dump it for lack of creative naming), and it's based more in rules, whereas IFRS's focus is principles.

BDO's Andy Gibson  said two systems might not seem like a big expense, but it could catch up over time. He added, the potential adoption of the IFRS in 2014 would affect how companies have to report their real estate assets. Each component  of a building would have to be listed differently based on its age. Plus, land  leases would be counted as separate from building  leases, reflecting the value of land in other areas of the world.