Business
Limited reforms within professional management circles have led in the past to activity-based costing, economic value added, and risk measures.
Not only do most businesses raise capital based on numbers derived from current standards, there are extensive lobbying efforts by the accounting industry to keep those standards roughly as they are: complex, loopholed, and unable to be applied or audited easily by laymen.
Heads of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission since the 1980s have consistently complained that this lobbying makes it impossible for them to apply meaningful reform, even in the wake of accounting scandals, e.g. that which felled Arthur Andersen in 2002.
Read more about this topic: Accounting Reform
Famous quotes containing the word business:
“In the United States all business not transacted over the telephone is accomplished in conjunction with alcohol or food, often under conditions of advanced intoxication. This is a fact of the utmost importance for the visitor of limited funds ... for it means that the most expensive restaurants are, with rare exceptions, the worst.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.”
—Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915)
“Our business is to have great credit and to use it little.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)