A Golden Age in Setting National Accounting Standards : The UK’s Accounting Standards Board, 1990–2000

At the beginning of the 1990s UK accounting standards were described as a ‘laughing stock’. By the millennium they were widely acclaimed and in some respects world-leading. This paper explores some of the key technical advances in this period, and the political processes employed to secure their acceptance. It discusses the firefighting activities of the early years to subdue egregious creative accounting, and subsequent major innovations in respect of M&A and of pensions. It outlines the resistance to reform from the accounting profession, the legal profession, actuaries and the UK Treasury. It draws on contemporaneous accounts of the debates, on cost-benefit estimates, and on a new autobiographical account of the period by three of the leading regulators in this period (Tweedie, Cook and Whittington (2023))