The Political Nature of Accounting Standard Setting Essay examples

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Pages: 9

The political process of the adoption of IAS’s and harmonising these standards with the AAS’s has had far reaching impacts. This may be due to the influences of the government, boards, corporations and regulatory bodies involved in dominating the process, which can be seen through a brief look at the history of the actions taken by each of these parties to change the accounting world. There are visible benefits to the parties who influenced the changes in both economical and social ways. Along with benefits for some parties comes disadvantages to those who lost their influential power. The make up of the Boards gives rise to questions as to what the goals of the boards are both in the near future as well as in the long run. The timeliness
However, the impacts have reached far and wide. When the IAS’s were adopted it was done so hurriedly, which resulted in “a more challenging task than originally anticipated” (Chand & Cummings 2008 pp. 175). There were complications, the platform had inconsistencies which made transition difficult. Convergence has been rocky due to the constant changes in the platform. (Chand & Cummings 2008 pp. 175) This raises the question: what are the advantages and disadvantages of the process?
Cost vs Benefits – Winners vs Losers
The Government benefited from the movement of power of setting accounting standards through the Treasury department, who in turn gained by securing an authoritative position, as would the accounting bodies through the auditing division. The “core-financial and “partial-financial” interest groups predominate the boards of the IASB and in turn the members of the AASB and FRC, which enables them to set standards that would fit their economic objectives. (Brown 2006 pp. 88). Other stakeholders who would be rewarded with benefits are the large funding companies who, due the monetary amounts they endow, have huge influences. This is mainly because it is hard to imagine that in the real world, those endowed with these funds couldn’t really say no to the demands of the endowers for fear of retraction of funds. So in the