CONTROVERSIAL ASPECTS REGARDING THE ACCOUNTING HARMONIZATION PROCESS IN ROMANIA. HARMONIZATION, CONVERGENCE OR CONFORMITY?

Abstract

The new configuration of the international economic relations which are in a general globalization process determined by the international capital circulation requires the compatibility and comparison of the information provided by the financial statements. The investors and the entrepreneurs wish to understand and to be able to compare the entities financial situation and performances, no matter the juridical and accounting system which are subdued to by their localization. The differences between the important variety of the accounting systems were identified long time ago and since then there have been efforts made in order to conceive a economic financial reporting structure, accessible to the entire accounting world. Therefore, there is the need of normalization, harmonization, and convergence in accounting. Our intention in the current paper is to bring again into discussion the problem of accounting harmonization, emphasizing a few aspects which in the Romanian context we consider to be controversial and which require some clarifications. This paper represents a brief review of the evolution of the accounting harmonization in Romania, analyzing the difficult moments and mainly it is focused on the conceptual understanding of the concepts of harmonization, convergence, and conformity in the Romanian accounting. Our approach is not an exhaustive one, but it has as objective to reflect on the importance of the stages of accounting modernization in Romania. In the last part of this paper, the conclusions that we reached after study, are presented synthetically, as well as the continuation of the approach initiated in other papers.

Keywords

• accounting harmonization
• normalization and standardization
• convergence