Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Thursday, Sep 12, 2002
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Thursday, Sep 12, 2002 |
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Opinion
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Accountancy Columns - Account Speak At long last
ONE of the longest letters in recent times from the desk of the CA Institute president came in the August issue of the journal and it made quite a few frank admissions. Such as: The past month has been a very confusing one for the accountancy profession worldwide; the so-called gods have proved to have feet of clay; people do not know whether to hold on to all that they have been so far told is unshakeable and unchangeable; as far as the lay public is concerned, the damage has been done; and so on. Clearly, the communiqué is a damage control exercise. But what is worrying is the sense of false comfort it gives. "Go beyond your feelings to your rationality and see what exactly is wrong," it exhorts. "If you do that, you will find that nothing is wrong." And for those who are gripped by strange fears, the diagnosis is simple: "What we are suffering from a kind of undefined anxiety. We are apprehensive without being very clear as to what it is exactly that we are apprehensive of." A case of unnamed virus on the run, perhaps. Even as many top Indian corporates present their accounts as per the US GAAP, for the benefit of global users of the financial statements, the missive talks about the "inadequacies". If you didn't know, "the tighter a knot is, the easier it slips." So? "It is easy to find loopholes in rules when rules are all that one has to go by." We do that all the time, don't we? No, "in India we follow principle-based accounting rather than rule-based accounting." Well, that can lead many to wonder as to what exactly we follow here. Okay, "these are days that can put an individual into a depression." Nothing abnormal, if you have "a feeling of being encircled, of being hemmed in by forces beyond oneself, a feeling of being submerged." Remember, "The hallmark of the professional is that at the end of the day, no matter what, he can always find the strength within himself to go doing what he does, in the best way that he can do it." Means, don't look for lifeboats.
D. Murali
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