ABSTRACT
From time to time for over 150 years pervasive flaws in accounting thought and practice have been brought to notice. The principal focus of attention has been the almost limitless array of valuation (or quantification) rules that have emerged under the widely fostered view that each mercantile firm may choose (and vary, as it pleases) the combination of rules that its accounts will follow. For the past seventy years professional and regulatory bodies have affirmed the desirability of ‘reducing the variety’ of those rules. But time after time the task has been shirked—to the point where one of the latest major exercises simply averred that five different valuation bases (called ‘attributes’) are used in present practice, and their use was expected to continue (FASB, 1994/5, p. 151).
