In May 2005, the University of Lethbridge and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Alberta sponsored the Banff Education Conference titled Professional Judgement: Can It Be Taught? The opening forum at the conference was a panel discussion on the topic presented by academics and...

For three centuries, Anglo-American Governments have been creating regulation and governance reforms (including mandatory audit requirements) in reaction to fraud. The most recent attempt in the U.S. is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). The Capital Markets Leadership Task Force Report in Canada...

We examine four key conceptual tensions that are at the heart of many financial reporting dilemmas: stocks vs. flows, ex-ante vs. ex post, conventions vs. economic substance, and top-down design vs. bottom-up evolution as sources of accounting practice. Associated with each of these conceptual...

This paper addresses the issues that confront the FASB and IASB in developing a new conceptual framework document. First, we suggest characteristics that a conceptual framework ought to exhibit. Most of these suggestions are based on our critique of the existing framework and the FASB-IASB work...