The purpose of this master thesis is to provide an analysis and insights of the accounting policies commonly used in shipping industry, which involve significant judgment and estimates by management of shipping companies. In particular, given the substantial amounts invested in long lived assets, we focus our interest on “Vessels” accounts and provide a thorough view of differences and similarities of accounting policies under the two major accounting frameworks, used in shipping sector, IFRS and US GAAP. In addition, with the use of a sample of listed shipping companies it is attempted to present the effect of different accounting conventions on profitability KPI’s and their variations under different accounting standards in order to highlight the importance of transparent and comparable financial reporting. In this context this thesis, underlines the role of auditing profession and present a profound analysis and practical examples of auditing approaches used, based on auditing standards in order to meet the expectations of relevant, reliable, comparable and consistent accounting information.