ABSTRACT
Accounting, and accountants, are under a cloud today. Many knowledgeable people are questioning the credibility of practitioners, and the information they turn out. It has been stated that accounting is primarily a service profession, As a service profession, the goal of accountants should be to depict in financial reports the economic phenomena affecting an entity and its stakeholders in a way that represents as faithfully as possible existing economic reality. Such accounting information is needed by those engaged in the decision-making process to enable them to evaluate the past so as to make better decisions in the future. The most significant contribution that accounting makes to the decision-making process is in providing information.
Capital Markets Research (CMR) and Accountants Choices Research (ACR) have added to our knowledge of accounting in various ways, But these approaches tend to he too narrow, and to exclude what in many ways is the raison d'etre of accounting suggested above. Although Conceptual Frameworks have been primarily the domain of standard-setters, this paper urges the profession, including academics, to adopt (rather than be forced into it at some point in time by the SEC and FASB) a meaningful Conceptual Framework for the discipline — one that has representational faithfulness to existing economic reality as its centerpiece.
