According to Ecclesiastes 1:15, ‘What is crooked cannot be straightened; what is lacking cannot be counted’. There is no suggestion that accounting is inherently crooked, but it is currently plagued by a disconnect between compliance and truth, hardly reflected in ICAEW’s motto: recte numerare (to number rightly).

Rules that allow preparers to account for key issues subjectively invite distortion. This outcome became inevitable once time honoured generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) were systematically replaced by International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), which is fixated with unverifiable fair value measurements that effectively abolished prudence and fair presentation as self-standing principles.