Bridging the gap between Vietnamese accounting standards and international accounting standards in the field of accounting and auditing

Abstract

    In the trend of globalization and international integration as well as the process of accounting convergence, there are two parallelsystems of accounting standards in the world: the national accounting standards and international accounting standards. Each country due todifferences in the legal, economic, political and cultural environment has different approaches, different directions to develop the nationalaccounting standards system for the best integration with international accounting standards (IAS/IFRS). The Vietnamese Accounting standardsSystem (VAS) consists of 26 standards, based on the IAS/IFRS system from 2001 to 2005 on the principle of using selectively the internationalpractice consistent with the characteristics of the economy and the level of management of Vietnamese enterprises at the time of promulgatingthe standards. After many years of implementation, the VAS system has contributed to enhancing the explicitness in the financial statements ofenterprises, reflecting the transactions of the market economy, meeting the requirements of the international integration. However, in the viewof the development trend, the VAS system is just a simple application of IAS/IFRS in the context of Vietnam. In fact, VAS has not reallyapproached IAS/IFRS yet and has not updated on the changes of IAS/IFRS in recent years. These gaps need to be gradually narrowed towardsthe highest integration between VAS and IAS/IFRS.