PREPAREDNESS TO TEACH INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL REPORTING STANDARDS (IFRS) IN ETHIOPIA: A STUDY ON SELECTED UNIVERSITIES

Modern type of business organizations was started in Ethiopian before hundred years ago and the number is tremendously increasing nowadays. However, there was no one set of generally accepted accounting standard used by business organization in the country till December 2014 when IFRS was proclaimed as the law of the land. Though IFRS was accepted for financial reporting in the country starting from 2014, the level of preparedness in teaching IFRS in Ethiopian universities was not studied. This paper is aimed at identifying problems in teaching IFRS among teachers in Ethiopia universities. To achieve this objective, data was collected from 46 academic staffs working in six universities in the country. The study found that teachers in relatively old universities are trying to incorporate IFRS in their course plan as compared to those in recently established universities. Generally, the level of preparedness to incorporate IFRS is low in majority of the universities under study. Lack of text books in line with IFRS, problem of integrating IFRS in to the curriculum and lack of practical experiences are the top three bottle necks that hinder teaching IFRS in our universities. In order to prepare our staffs to teach in line with IFRS, both short and long term capacity building strategies were recommended in this study.