Europe continues to converge in many ways: increasing use of the euro, harmonization of laws, increasing mobility of labor and expanding coordination of monetary policy, and fiscal policy. Not least among the mechanisms to form a more solid union has been the adoption of IFRS, required from 2005. The adoption of a single set of high quality accounting standards is intended to produce accounting reports of uniformly high quality. While this is the aim, it is by no means certain that this will be the result. If firms do not follow the standards, and if auditors do not enforce strict compliance, then the intention will be thwarted. One of the goals of this paper is to evaluate the uniformity  of compliance with IFRS among European Union countries. An important matter, then, is the way different institutions affect the quality of financial reports. An oft‐discussed factor is the legal system. That discussion has yielded very little information about the law’s effect. The focus in this paper is to connect the operation of law in different countries with the quality of reporting in those countries, both theoretically and empirically.