Time was when accountants were dull people. Dull but happy. They recorded numbers. They put them into schedules such as profit and loss accounts and balance sheets. Everything added up, which was nice. It was dull work, but that didn’t matter. They were dull people. Dull but happy.
Then things happened that made accountants unhappy. First came inflation. This meant the numbers they put into company accounts did not match with numbers in the real world because prices and costs changed so quickly. Worse – insidious, even – next came creative accounting. This meant figures some finance directors slipped into the company’s books were designed to wheedle their way past the company’s auditors and to fox shareholders. That was really bad.
Accountants knew they must respond. They had to stop being dull and start being clever. So they souped up the standards-setting boards whose job was to formalise the way company accounts must be presented. Item by item, they dealt with company accounts. As they did so, they found that new accounting standards became ever more complex. Instead of quantifying the past, increasingly they found that their standards demanded that they speculate on the future.