(7)In January 2005, the Accounting Standards Board of Japan (ASBJ) and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) announced their agreement to launch a joint project to reduce differences between IFRS and Japanese GAAP and launched a joint work programme in March 2005 towards the convergence of Japanese GAAP with IFRS. In January 2006, the Accounting Standards Board of Canada publicly stated its objective to move to a single set of globally accepted high-quality standards for public companies and concluded that this objective is best accomplished by converging Canadian accounting standards with IFRS within five years. In February 2006, the IASB and the US Financial Accounting Standards Board published a memorandum of understanding which outlines a work programme for convergence between IFRS and US GAAP with a view to fulfilling one of the US Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) conditions that need to be met before it will lift the reconciliation requirement for foreign issuers using IFRS that are registered with the SEC, by 2009 at the latest.