The relevance of International Financial Reporting Standards to Kazakhstan: perception of auditors

This paper discusses the relevance of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) to emerging economies in general and Kazakhstan in particular. It uses evidence from interviews conducted with senior auditors from two Big Four accountancy firms in Kazakhstan and prior studies exploring IFRS implementation in emerging economies to shed light on how complex institutional and cultural factors influence accounting. The findings suggest that accounting practices in Kazakhstan are dominated by the historically inherited institutionalised accounting system of the Soviet Union era, when corporate reporting was primarily geared towards meeting the needs of government agencies such as Statistics Committee and tax authorities. The main problems of implementing IFRS in Kazakhstan were pressures to comply with tax codes and the early stage of development of the accounting profession with the consequent lack of IFRS expertise and deficient IFRS enforcement mechanisms.