Management accounts have never been subject to the rigorous straightjacket of regulatory standards because people running businesses base their internal accounting systems on utility, or relevance to their needs.

In an ideal world, users of published financial statements would be consulted on utility before involving the esoteric speculations of standard-setting technicians. But the expanding panoply of national and international accounting standards appears to have little regard for the needs of users, who are increasingly obliged to ignore or add back stuff that should never have been there in the first place.