| Uncertainty on euro plans is rife among Irish companies, according to the most recent survey conducted by the Forfas EMU Business Awareness Campaign. |
Uncertainty on euro plans is rife among Irish companies, according to the most recent survey conducted by the Forfas EMU Business Awareness Campaign.
According to the survey, just twenty-five per cent of companies have already completed changes to their basic accounting system, with a further fifteen per cent planing to do so by the end of 1999. This falls short of the forty-nine per cent who, when surveyed in December 1998, intended to have these changes made in 1999. Commenting on the survey results, Eoin Gahan, project manager with Forfas says that the levels of actual take up of the euro for use in business transactions has fallen significantly below what was originally planned when EMU commenced. According to Gahan, there is a danger of euro complacency.
‘What is perhaps most disconcerting about these findings is the level of uncertainty currently expressed by firms with regard to when they will change the basic operational functions of their business to euro’, says Gahan. He continues: ‘This coupled with high levels of planned activity indicated towards the latter end of the transitional period, as well as into 2002, shows that a large number of companies are clearly delaying actual practical preparations until the latest possible time’.
The survey says that forty-one per cent of all businesses are still unsure of when they will be changing over to the euro as their base operating currency, with a further twenty-six per cent waiting until 2002 to make the change.
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| Article appeared in the October 1999 issue.
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