Chairman of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland (ICAI), John Greely, yesterday welcomed assurances from EU internal markets commissioner Charlie McCreevy that he would not entertain any more "radical revision" of accounting standards.

Mr Greely was speaking at the close of the ICAI conference in Galway yesterday.

In an address given to the conference on Friday, Mr McCreevy said that existing reforms would yield benefits in a few years' time, but that he wouldn't pursue any more "revolutionary new standards" in the foreseeable future.

Mr Greely described the commissioner's commitment as "open minded". "The profession will welcome this commitment to a period of stability in the evolution of standards. The last two years alone have seen the introduction of a whole new suite of both accounting and auditing standards. We clearly need time to see these standards bed down."

In recent years Mr McCreevy's directorate general for the internal market has brought forward regulations to improve and harmonise the regulation of accounting and auditing across the EU, measures which have drawn criticism from bodies from the accountancy profession.

Mr Greely said accountancy firms were subject to an unfair regulatory burden and said that increasing this burden was not the right response to financial scandals. "His preparedness to assess whether some of the regulatory changes in recent years meet a reasonable cost-benefit analysis is an important yardstick which regulators should bear in mind."