The Accounting Consensus: Implications for Accounting Education, Research and the Profession

The Accounting Consensus: Implications for Accounting Education, Research and

the ProfessionShyam Sunder

Yale School of ManagementEIASM Workshop on Accounting and Economics

Università Bocconi, Milan, ItalyJune 19-20, 2008

Financial Reporting: Some Commonly-held Beliefs

04/22/2023 (c) 2005 Sunder, Nanny Knows Best 3

1. Universal Standards• Universal standards of financial reporting applied

across time, economies, industries and corporate size and organizational forms best serve the constituent interests– Standardization does save costs and effort, (electrical

plugs, clothing, cars, street grids, commercial codes)– Becomes counterproductive beyond certain limits– How do we know where to stop?– Rhetoric of universal accounting standards and universal

language


2. The Static Ideal

• There exists a set of financial reporting standards that, once discovered and implemented, will induce corporations and their auditors to prepare the best attainable financial reports– Dynamics of the game between managers and

standard setters makes any such static ideal all but impossible

– Standards is only a (small) part of the problem


3. People or Structure

• If we select knowledgeable, experienced, self-less, public-spirited, and wise individuals to constitute bodies that devise accounting standards through deliberation and due process, we can improve financial reporting– Individuals stand where they sit– Much emphasis on the quality of individuals, too

little attention to the structure of game they are asked to play


4. Engineering Standards through Deliberation

• It is possible to construct or discover better financial reporting standards through deliberation in properly organized corporate entities (such as the IASB, the FASB, etc.).– Assumes that such bodies can know the

consequences of their actions– History does not support the proposition


5. Specialization in Setting Standards

• Specialist standard setting bodies, standing ready to address new problems, inquiries and requests for clarifications help improve financial reporting– Their existence encourages a new “clarification”

game targeted at them– They must keep a full agenda (performance)– Revenue and budget pressures– Over time, their output must accumulate to a

thick rule book


6. What is Good and Bad?

• Standard setters can tell which standards are better and why.– Little evidence that they know, or can know– Cost-of-capital is the result of complex

interactions among many factors (including accounting)

– These influences cannot be sorted out by ex ante analysis

– Ex post analysis of data to assess the impact on cost of capital may be possible


7. Standards Monopolies

• Granting monopoly power in a given jurisdiction to standards written by a given body can help improve corporate financial reporting– Informational disadvantage of a monopoly– No opportunity for experimentation– No opportunity to learn from the experience of

alternatives– No pressure to do better, or to correct errors


8. Competition and Race to the Bottom

• A regime that encourages reporting entities to choose among the standards written by competing organizations (and paying them a royalty for the privilege) induces a “race to the bottom” to devise less demanding standards– Counter examples (Stock exchanges, bond rating

services, appliance standards, college accreditation, bank regulation, corporate charters across U.S. states, etc.)


9. Force and Effectiveness

• Increase in the power of enforcement behind authoritative standards improves compliance and quality of financial reporting– Increased enforcement also increases resources

devoted to evasion– Draconian punishments do not necessarily

induce better behavior– Crime, alcohol and drug abuse


10. Statutory Approach Dominates Common Law

• The quasi-statutory approach to setting accounting standards dominates a common law approach to financial reporting– Evidence?– Constitution (U.K., U.S., Europe)


11. Written Standards Dominate Social Norms

• Written standards backed by power of enforcement work better than unwritten social norms backed only by internal and external informal sanctions– Social norms govern great parts of our lives

including many aspects of law– Insider trading– Guilty beyond reasonable doubt– Private commercial codes (cotton, diamond

trades)


12. Who defends the middle ground?

• The ideal accounting regime would consist of all written standards or all social norms– Easier to make the extreme cases for standards

or norms alone– Difficulty of defending the middle ground where

both may co-exist, as they do in many other aspects of life


13. New Problems, New Solutions

• Financial reporting and governance problems originated in the 20th century– History tells us otherwise– Governance problems of the East India Company– Clive, Hastings, and the Company’s Court of

Directors


14. Financial Reporting is Getting Better

• Seventy years of standardization of financial reports (in U.S.) has helped improve the quality of financial reporting– Evidence?– Is a thicker rulebook indication of better financial

reporting?– Perfect correlation between accounting and

stock returns?– How do we judge if our financial reports are

getting better?


15. Fewer Alternatives, Better Reports

• Fewer the alternative treatments the reporting entities are allowed to choose from, the better the quality of financial reporting– Fewer alternatives also tie the hands of the

management of well-run companies who may wish to signal their confidence, competence and prospects by choosing reporting practices others find difficult to emulate


16. Auditor’s Bargaining Power

• Well-specified standards enhance the bargaining power of the auditor vis-à-vis the client– Standards also encourage clients to demand:

show me the rule– Reduced reliance on judgment– More detailed the standards, greater the part of

accountant’s work that can be replaced by a computer, and lower the value of the service


17. Accounting & Auditing Games

• Written standards constrain the tendency of managers, auditors and investment bankers to play accounting and auditing games– On the contrary, they encourage and facilitate

game-playing by reducing uncertainty about what is, and is not, acceptable

– 3 percent SPEs => Enron


18. Individual responsibility

• Written financial reporting standards strengthen the individual responsibility of managers, auditors, and investment bankers for fair representation– On the contrary, they undermine individual

responsibility for fair representation and the big picture by shifting attention to meeting the letter, not spirit, of the specific provisions and their wording


19. Education

• Written standards make it easier to educate better accountants and attract talent to the profession– Written standards degrade the class room from

reasoning and intellectual debate to rote memorization, reinforce street image of accounting as boring and mechanical

– They make it less attractive to young talent


20. Nothing’s New under the Sun

• Have I said something new?– I wish. William T. Baxter (Professor Emeritus,

LSE), made many of these arguments over half-a-century ago (“Recommendations on Accounting Theory” in Baxter and Davidson, Studies in Accounting Theory, 1st edition).

Beware of Consensus

• A different perspective• You would be left behind if you do not follow

the crowd• Washington Consensus• Accounting Consensus—five main elements

Accounting Consensus 1

• The standards developed should be confined to principles, and not become detailed rules– Nobody can tell which is which– IFRS vs. FAS, yet plans to adopt FAS wholesale– Fair values: principle or rhetorical device

Accounting Consensus 2• A single set of high quality written standards of

financial reporting applied to all companies (at least the publicly traded ones) in the world will improve financial reporting by making financial reports more comparable, and thus assist investors and other users of financial statements make better decisions– All prefer high quality, but what is it (Joyce et al.– Principles-comparability contradiction– Accounting for research & development costs (FAS 2)– Evidence that accounting standards help investors or

managers make better decisions?

Accounting Consensus 3• The best way to develop such standards is to create a single

deliberative corporate body consisting of appropriate experts with a proper governance structure and legally assured funding, functioning under the oversight of statutory regulatory authorities such as the SEC and the EC– Difficulty of assessing proposed standards– Even simple engineering design need field trials– Complexity of social institutions, risk of getting boxed into a wrong

standards– Division of simplicity and complexity between strategy and institutions– Ecosystem view of financial reporting system– Competition with no tax revenues

Accounting Consensus 4

• To this end, the operations of the FASB and the IASB should be gradually merged into one corporate body and one set of standards to be called IFRS– From social norms to uniform written standards– Effect of uniformity of education, research and

profession– Compare accounting education to education for

other professions

Accounting Consensus 5• This single set of standards should be practiced in the

U.S., EC, and elsewhere, and the U.S. educational system should prepare itself to integrate IFRS into its curricula so U.S. graduates will be able to prepare, use, and audit financial reports based on IFRS– Educational consequences an afterthought at best– Effect of expansion of written standards on classroom

discourse– Educational capacity: chance to shift to general principles of

accounting– Place of accounting in the university: medicine or plumbing


The Problem of Setting Efficient Standards

• Criteria• Generation of alternatives• Evaluation of alternatives• Complex interactions among accounting, capital and

labor markets• Facilitation of evolution of accounting norms• Balancing statutory and common law• Balancing adjustment speed and errors• No substitute for personal responsibility• The nanny does not know, but can help


How Can the Nanny Help?• Government, quasi-government or private sector

bodies can play a positive role in evolution of norms of accounting through oversight– No monopoly jurisdiction– Competition with alternatives (royalties)– Opportunity to experiment– Co-existence of multiple sets of standards for different

clienteles—diversity essential to evolution– Excel conversion workbooks (high R-square)– Personal responsibility for fair representation– Accounting Court: guilty beyond reasonable doubt


In Contrast to IASB (FASB) Command & Control View

• To develop accounting standards:– A single set (monopoly?)– Of high quality (what does that mean?)– Understandable (to who?)– Enforceable (stick, not norms)– Global (no clientele or diversity)

• Are we ready for an alternative mind set about financial reporting?


Whither Accounting: Windows™ or Open Systems

• Comfort vs. choice• Uniformity and stagnation vs. dynamic change• Predictability vs. some disorder• High prices or the advantages of technological progress• Financial reporting as an eco-system or a machine

(garden or a building)• Huxley or Hayek• Nanny or personal responsibility• Role of accounting researchers/professors?

Concluding Remarks

• In the preface to his Dictionary, Johnson wrote about his “fortuitous and unguided excursions into… the boundless chaos of a living speech." Can authoritative uniform standards without collaboration with social norms bring a semblance of order to the chaos to financial reporting? After seven decades of incessant efforts, the answer stares us in the face

Thank You.

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The Accounting Consensus: Implications for Accounting Education, Research and the Profession