The vision for the STAREP IFRS for Regulators series of activities is that financial regulators will promote and monitor the enforcement of a single set of high-quality international accounting standards.

High-quality international accounting standards such as the IFRS will support the efficient operation of markets by ensuring that investors, creditors and other stakeholders have access to timely, reliable and relevant information about the financial position and results of the operations of a company for a given period. Regulators are one of the primary user groups of financial reporting and they require excellent skills in analyzing annual reports and supporting disclosure materials in order to carry out their supervisory activities.

The STAREP IFRS for Regulators activities aim to build capacity and knowledge of IFRS among financial regulators (i.e. banking, insurance and securities supervisors) to enhance their supervisory practices over the financial information prepared by entities they supervise. Regulators of each country participating in the STAREP program can gain and share thorough analyses of expected changes in accounting standards and prudential rules in the workshops. The workshops have supported the implementation process for each participating regulator for the new accounting standard for financial instruments, IFRS 9, the first application of which was 2018. All participating countries have implemented IFRS 9 on time. The workshops and publications have also focused on how to develop better cooperation with the external auditors of supervised entities for better quality of audits and enhanced supervision.