Accounting reform is an expansion of
accounting rules that goes beyond financial measures for both individual economic entities and national economies. It is advocated by those who consider the focus of the current standards and practices wholly inadequate to the task of measuring and reporting the activity, success, and failure of the modern enterprise, including government.
The real debate concerns concepts such as whether to report transactions, such as asset acquisitions, at their cost or their current market values. The former, traditional approach, appeals for its reliability but can quickly lose its relevance due to inflation and other factors; the latter, an increasingly common approach, is appealing for its relevance but is less reliable due to the need to use subjective measures. Accounting standards setters such as the
International Accounting Standards Board
The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) is the independent accounting standard-setting body of the IFRS Foundation.
The IASB was founded on April 1, 2001, as the successor to the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC). ...
attempt to balance relevance and reliability.
Business
Limited reforms within professional
management
Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business.
Management includes the activities ...
circles have led to activity-based costing,
economic value-added, and
risk
In simple terms, risk is the possibility of something bad happening. Risk involves uncertainty about the effects/implications of an activity with respect to something that humans value (such as health, well-being, wealth, property or the environme ...
measures. Current accounting practices have also been criticized for being too complex.
Heads of the
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government, created in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The primary purpose of the SEC is to enforce the law against market ...
since the 1980s have consistently complained that this lobbying makes it impossible for them to apply meaningful reform, even in the wake of
accounting scandals
Accounting, also known as accountancy, is the measurement, processing, and communication of financial and non financial information about economic entities such as businesses and corporations. Accounting, which has been called the "languag ...
, e.g., that which felled