When Big 4 and universities play IFRS !

The article is extracted from smart pro.

Through the IFRS University Consortium, Deloitte is contributing resources to Ohio State and Virginia Tech universities to assist the schools in developing IFRS curricula. The contributions to Ohio State and Virginia Tech include drafting course materials such as classroom guides and case studies and providing Deloitte professionals as lecturers. The classroom guides and course materials will be made available to other interested universities.

The announcement was made at the Deloitte/Federation of Schools of Accountancy (FSA) Faculty Consortium meeting in Chicago, a curriculum development program for accounting educators that is sponsored annually by the Deloitte Foundation, the not-for-profit arm of Deloitte LLP.

Participating schools can benefit by having input in the direction, goals and resources available from the consortium; participation in periodic webcasts; sharing of best practices used in the classroom; involvement in the development of materials; and access to the support and guidance from Deloitte professionals, as well as to Deloitte IFRS information resources, publications and training sessions.

There is no cost for institutions to join the Deloitte IFRS University Consortium.

"Existing curriculum materials have scant amounts of IFRS content," said D.J. Gannon, partner and leader of Deloitte's IFRS Center of Excellence in the U.S. "Textbooks normally publish on a three- to four-year cycle. And faculty is pressed for time to create meaningful course materials that will help students understand IFRS and U.S. GAAP. We at Deloitte recognize the need to help in these efforts and look forward to contributing our resources not only to Ohio State and Virginia Tech, but other institutions in developing solutions to these challenges."

In November 2007, the Deloitte Foundation approved a grant of $81,000 to Virginia Tech to develop teaching materials to aid instructors and professors in incorporating the differences between U.S. GAAP and IFRS into intermediate accounting courses. Additionally, Deloitte representatives have been contributing case studies and course materials to Ohio State and participating in classroom lectures as part of a course on the differences between IFRS and U.S. GAAP, which is being offered this spring to graduate accounting students.

Ohio State and Virginia Tech will discuss their IFRS course materials at the American Accounting Association's annual meeting taking place August 3-6 in Anaheim, California.

Fellow Big Four firm Ernst & Young has launched a similiar program, the Ernst & Young Academic Resource Center.