Both earthquakes happened at nearly the same time, in the same country, and fall within the same emergency level based on the Indonesian IASC Contingency Plan (IASC 2009).
Where in-country IASC exist, like in Indonesia, this consideration can be introduced to the inter-agency contingency plan managed by IASC.
It does not help that the IASC is bureaucratic, secretive and political.
Because the IASC could not get everybody to agree, many standards allow different accounting treatments.
But the IASC has so far failed to produce standards that the SEC is willing to endorse.
The SEC's chairman, Arthur Levitt, was instrumental in getting the IASC to draw up a set of core standards, a job it has just finished.
Irin has conducted several interviews with high-level aid officials on the topic of reform and found little evidence of real momentum for change, particularly among IASC members, who have vested interests, mostly financial, in the status quo.
The IASB inherited its standards from the IASC, a body set up in 1973 that had to take into account all the views of the many countries represented on its board.
Fears are growing that, later this year, America's regulators will veto a plan by the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC), which met this week in London, to promote a single worldwide set of standards.
An eighth planned roundtable entitled "Building the future of humanitarian action: towards more effective, context-specific, and predictable responses" – meant to address the core architecture of the system – did not appear on the final list of roundtables, seemingly due to a "resistance", as one secretariat member put it, from some IASC members to opening such a conversation.
The IASC team in Indonesia and the Government of Indonesia produced a national contingency plan in early 2009, a few months before the earthquakes studied here (IASC 2009).
