By Huw Jones
LONDON, Nov 15 (Reuters) - The United States will soften its reform of "fair value" and agree next year to adopt global rules, two senior industry officials said on Monday.
The Group of 20 (G20) top economies agreed last week that the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and its U.S. counterpart the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) should "converge" their rules by the end of 2011.
The aim is to cut complexity and improve transparency and comparability of company reports for regulators and investors.
The G20 deadline was delayed by six months due to differing approaches by the IASB and FASB over pricing bank assets and concerns that new rules were being forged too hastily.
The IASB has already agreed to price bank assets with a mix of amortised cost and fair value or the going market rate, while FASB has proposed full fair value, a step the U.S. banking industry opposes.
IASB board member Stephen Cooper said he believed the U.S. body will end up with a mixed approach to pricing as well.
"I think they will reconsider the fair value approach," Cooper told an Ernst & Young accountancy conference.
He hinted there could be some last minute tweaks to the IASB rule if the United States moves close enough to it.
This week the two standard setters will also try to forge a common approach to expected losses, which refers to making banks flag anticipated losses from soured loans far earlier so that problems don't snowball and require taxpayer bailouts to solve.
"I hope this coming Wednesday we will resolve this and be on the same page," Cooper said.
The six-month delay in full convergence has also meant that U.S. regulators won't decide until next year whether to go to the next step and adopt IASB's rules known as IFRS.
"The working assumption is that the U.S. will adopt IFRS," IASB board member Philippe Danjou told the conference.
"Certainly there are very good indications that this will happen," Danjou said.
There was no need to converge all IASB and FASB standards and that agreement on the main issues would make it easier for the United States to adopt IFRS, Danjou said.
He also urged countries to apply IFRS as approved by the IASB and not as changed "here and elsewhere" in some parts of the world like Europe which has a "carve out" from one key rule.
"We must achieve endorsement of our IFRS and not a different set of standards," Danjou said.
The IASB will also consult shortly on whether a welter of rule changes due to convergence should be introduced on one "big bang" date or phased in over time. A poll of the 500 delegates at Monday's conference showed a marked split between supporters of a big bang and phasing in.