The Ohio Society of CPAs kicked off its expanded schedule of highly popular Ohio Accounting Shows last week in Dayton featuring nationally renowned accounting and business leaders addressing major issues such as the Auditing Standards Board's (ASB) Clarity Project, XBRL, financial statement fraud, IFRS, and fair value. Nearly 500 accounting professionals heard keynote speakers and attended sessions across eight targeted information tracks. The Ohio Accounting Show schedule remaining this year includes Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus. For the show schedule, visit www.ohioscpa.com.

Among the highlights, Charles E. Landes, CPA, AICPA vice president of professional standards, provided members with an auditing standards update. Landes addressed the Clarity Project, which lays the foundation for a much simpler convergence between U.S. Generally Accepted Auditing Standards (GAAS) and international standards.

"We've had many discussions with the IAASB [International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board] about convergence and they have also undergone a project similar to the Clarity Project," Landes said. While the primary goal of the project is to raise the level of audit quality, the ASB has been moving towards international convergence and they will continue to do so.

Landes noted that the ASB is "probably two years ahead of the accounting standards in terms of convergence with international auditing standards."

Attendees gained insights into the very beginnings of XBRL and the path to global adoption from Liv A. Watson, vice president of global strategy at EDGAR Online and chair of the XBRL International Jurisdiction Working Group.

"I believe we owe it to future generations to put our information into a usable format," Watson said to the crowd. "XBRL simply separates the data from the application to make it readable by both humans and other applications," Watson explained.

She also encouraged attendees to learn more about XBRL GL - the global ledger taxonomy – which will allow the representation of anything that is found in a chart of accounts, journal entries or historical transactions, financial and non-financial.