Problems in financial reporting are often blamed on the rules. In trying to outlaw the system of “smoothing” which covered up many sins the rule-makers have been accused of simply making figures more volatile and less understandable. The author looks at the idea of performance measurement...

We summarise the response of the EAA's FRSC to Towards a Disclosure Framework for the Notes, a Discussion Paper (DP) issued jointly by EFRAG, ANC and FRC. While supportive of much of the DP, and in particular of the underlying aim to place disclosures on a sounder conceptual foundation, we...

The European Accounting Association (EAA) Financial Reporting Standards Committee (FRSC) provided a response to the International Accounting Standards Board's (IASB's) 2013 Discussion Paper (DP) on completing and revising its Conceptual Framework. The response consisted of a literature-based...

Fair value measurement (FVM) in IFRS calls for a market-oriented representation of economic ‘reality’, whereby the values attributed to rights (assets) and obligations (liabilities) are in principle determined from the perspective of the ‘market participant’ rather than that of the...

Do international accounting standards require conservative accounting? The IASB's conceptual framework suggests that they should not, while the research literature is largely silent on the matter, typically presuming conservatism to be an outcome of private contracting rather than standardized,...

A symposium at the European Accounting Association (EAA) Annual Meetings on Friday 23 May 2014 in Tallinn, organised by Accounting in Europe and the EAA's Financial Reporting Standards Committee (FRSC), brought together leading respondents to the Discussion Paper and the International Accounting...

The stated purpose of the IFRS Conceptual Framework is to assist the IASB to develop Standards that are based on consistent concepts, and also to assist preparers to develop consistent accounting policies when Standards either do not apply or allow a choice of accounting policy. Yet, the...

To meet the objectives of financial reporting in the International Accounting Standards Board’s Conceptual Framework, the ‘balance-sheet approach’ embraced by the Framework is necessary but not sufficient. Critical, but largely overlooked, is the role of uncertainty, which we argue defines...

Corporate activity promotes economic growth. This has obvious benefits for society, yet by placing unsustainable demands on natural resources, it also poses serious problems. Part of the response to this should be clarity over corporate responsibility and accountability towards the environment,...