Fasb: The People, The Process, and The Politics

by Paul B.W. Miller, Rodney J. Redding

The overall goal of this text is to pull back the veil of mystique that prevents many people from understanding an organization that is very important to the accounting profession and to the U.S. economy. The FASB describes why financial reporting exists, why GAAP are needed, and why the FASB was created. This is a great supplement for the Intermediate Accounting course as well as an Accounting Theory course.

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

Reviews

[Ivy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am assuming that anyone reading this book is a student who was assigned it. If so, you should know that the authors hold fringe accounting views that they present as obvious reality throughout the book. The book has a lot of useful history on the FASB and its political position. But shot through every section are opinions stated as facts and phrased as dismissively as possible. They call differences of opinion glib and "simply not valid." They place words like "real" and "reported" and "apparent" in sarcastic italics.

As a working CPA, I can say that any attempt to take the complexities of reality and create a rule set to represent it as numbers will inevitably contain compromises, and therefore professionals will have differences of opinion. This book contains no hint that differences of opinion might be valid. There is the authors' point of view, and then there are self-interested liars.

So if you are reading this for class, please don't take any of the authors' opinions as representative of the accounting profession.