ABSTRACT
The recent history of accounting – encompassing the last three decades in particular – has been marked by the rapid and continuing promulgation of accounting standards and other technical regulatory statements. There is a widespread belief that these accounting rules are necessary to improve the quality of accounting information and have been effective in achieving that end. In contrast, the central theme of this study is that this preoccupation with accounting rule-making and rule-compliance has distracted attention from the essential criterion of ‘quality’ in financial reporting. Compliance with rules per se is not what determines the reliability and usefulness of accounting information. The essential criterion of quality in accounting abides in the very meaning of the word itself. To provide an account of an event or circumstance is to describe that event or circumstance. A reliable and objectively useful account will be characterized by a correspondence between the description and the event or circumstance it purports to describe.1
