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Private Standards, Public Governance: A New Look At The Financial Accounting Standards Board, William W. Bratton
Private Standards, Public Governance: A New Look At The Financial Accounting Standards Board, William W. Bratton
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The Financial Accounting Standards Board (the “FASB”) presents a puzzle: How has this private standard setter managed simultaneously (1) to remain independent, (2) to achieve institutional stability and legitimacy, and (3) to operate in a politicized context in the teeth of op-position from its own constituents? This Article looks to governance design to account for this institutional success. The FASB’s founders made a strategic choice to create a regulatory agency that sought independence rather than political responsiveness. The FASB also set out a coherent theory of accounting, the “Conceptual Framework,” to contain and direct its decisions. The Conceptual Framework contributed …
Rules, Principles, And The Accounting Crisis In The United States, William W. Bratton
Rules, Principles, And The Accounting Crisis In The United States, William W. Bratton
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The Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Securities Exchange Commission move too quickly ·when they prod the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the standard setter for US GAAP, to move immediately to a principles-based system. Priorities respecting reform of corporate reporting in the US need to be ordered more carefully. Incentive problems impairing audit performance should be solved first through institutional reform insulating the audit from the negative impact of rent-seeking and solving adverse selection problems otherwise affecting audit practice. So long as auditor independence and management incentives respecting accounting treatments remain suspect. the US reporting system holds out no actor plausibly positioned …
Shareholder Value And Auditor Independence, William W. Bratton
Shareholder Value And Auditor Independence, William W. Bratton
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This Article questions the practice of framing problems concerning auditors’ professional responsibility inside a principal-agent paradigm. If professional independence is to be achieved, auditors cannot be enmeshed in agency relationships with the shareholders of their audit clients. As agents, the auditors by definition become subject to the principal’s control and cannot act independently. For the same reason, auditors’ duties should be neither articulated in the framework of corporate law fiduciary duty, nor conceived relationally at all. These assertions follow from an inquiry into the operative notion of the shareholder-beneficiary. The Article unpacks the notion of the shareholder and tells a …
Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley And Accounting: Rules Versus Principles Versus Rents, William W. Bratton
Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley And Accounting: Rules Versus Principles Versus Rents, William W. Bratton
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No abstract provided.