Michael Bromwich

Management Accounting is part of the celebrations to mark CIMA’s 90th anniversary in 2009. It looks at the development of cost and management accounting from the founding of the Institute to today. It considers a number of immediate challenges to management accountants and surveys a range of issues and challenges that will likely affect management accounting thought and practice in the future. The authors examine the possibilities for accountants to widen their focus and become more familiar with the enterprise technology determining their organisations’ cost structures and with the effects of multiple production in various locations, such as economies or diseconomies of scale. Such change may require the alteration of traditional cost models used by accountants to become more nuanced. The book suggests how this may be accomplished and highlights the need for management accountants to work as part of management teams throughout the organisation as business partners rather than remain grounded in specialist information provision roles. Alnoor Bhimani is Professor of Management Accounting at the London School of Economics. He is also a Certified Management Accountant as well as an author of 15 books and over 100 articles. Michael Bromwich was CIMA’s Professor of Accounting and Financial Management at the London School of Economics and Political Science (1985 to 2006), now Emeritus. He is a Past President of CIMA (1987/88) and currently serves on CIMA’s Technical Committee.

International accounting standards tend to converge, as do auditing, enforcement, and corporate governance, whereas trading of equity shares remains essentially national. The book provides a thorough analysis of what information investors really need, how financial accounting systems developed and their current requirements in major commercial countries, and examines current issues, particularly the benefits and costs a single or multiple accounting standards, the bases for accounting standards, and limitations to accounting disclosure in financial statements.

A few years ago, Americans held out their systems of corporate governance and financial disclosure as models to be emulated by the rest of the world. But in late 2001 U.S. policymakers and corporate leaders found themselves facing the largest corporate accounting scandals in American history. The spectacular collapses of Enron and Worldcom?as well as the discovery of accounting irregularities at other large U.S. companies?seemed to call into question the efficacy of the entire system of corporate governance in the United States. In response, Congress quickly enacted a comprehensive package of reform measures in what has come to be known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ followed by making fundamental changes to their listing requirements. The private sector acted as well. Accounting firms?watching in horror as one of their largest, Arthur Andersen, collapsed after a criminal conviction for document shredding?tightened their auditing procedures. Stock analysts and ratings agencies, hit hard by a series of disclosures about their failings, changed their practices as well. Will these reforms be enough? Are some counterproductive? Are other shortcomings in the disclosure system still in need of correction? These are among the questions that George Benston, Michael Bromwich, Robert E. Litan, and Alfred Wagenhofer address in Following the Money. While the authors agree that the U.S. system of corporate disclosure and governance is in need of change, they are concerned that policymakers may be overreacting in some areas and taking actions in others that may prove to be ineffective or even counterproductive. Using the Enron case as a point of departure, the authors argue that the major problem lies not in the accounting and auditing standards themselves, but in the system of enforcing those standards. Rather than attempting to craft a single set of accounting and reporting standards for all companies throughout the world, the authors advise policymakers to allow competition between the two major sets of standards: Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and International Financial Reporting Standards. The authors also believe that the corporate disclosure system needs to be updated to reflect changes in the underlying economy. In particular, they recommend new forms of disclosure for a variety of nonfinancial indicators to better enable investors and analysts to ascertain the source and nature of intangible assets. They also urge policymakers to exploit the advantages of the Internet by encouraging more frequent financial disclosures in a form that will make them more widely accessible and more easily used.