Complex and long accounts are here to stay - a senior accounting figure has told bankers who met at the annual conference of the British Bankers' Association. KPMG's partner in charge of assurance of UK financial services, Bill Michael, said that while improvements can and should be made, 'complex and long accounts are here to stay reflecting the world we live and the broad range of financial users.' Speaking about the role that accounts played in the financial crisis, Michael said that one of the one of the biggest problems was not so much that risks were not reported but that they were not identified as critical risks, that needed monitoring, in the first place. 'We lived in a market that was blinded by faith in false precision models and assumption ranging from VAR (value-at-risk) and credit derivative models to the belief liquidity and unlimited funding would be here forever,' he said. He further called for the profession to become more practical rather than search for theoretical perfection and for attention on increasingly complex financial innovations: 'Financial innovation continues to grow - transactions and risk are getting more complex contrary to views expressed today transactions are still very complex,' he said. 'In such an environment policed by rules, accounting is often swimming against the tide, increasing the challenge for financial statements to be more objective and meaningful.' 'Therefore its no surprise accounts are long and complex with inherent limitations that need to be better understood,' Michael added.