A phoney war is being fought between those who promulgate accounting standards and those whose job it is to ensure bare-minimum compliance with those standards.
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Accounting is like a bad movie that is so bad it is good. Weirdly enjoyable, in other words.
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I am not remotely prejudiced. Some of the best people I know are accountants.
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Skilled accountants are master manipulators. They are worth every penny of their salary. The very best, of course, are on a commission.
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Most accountants spend their time reconciling data points. A few who are more skilled than that attempt to explain what those data points mean. The best and the brightest accountants, having seen through its illusory nature, dispense with data entirely.
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It is hard not to be cynical about the accounting profession, for which wrongdoing is culturally encoded and legally neutered. A case of clever people doing bad things with impunity.
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The conceptual framework for accounting is every bit as abstruse as the most impenetrable philosophical treatise. Basically, for a company to report its numbers in accordance with the dictates of this framework it needs to hire the accounting equivalent of a Kant or a Hegel. And there are probably three such people alive on planet Earth at any given time (if you’re lucky). Therefore: the accounts you are looking at are almost certainly not compliant with the accounting framework. Whether this matters or not is something you must decide for yourself. My own personal view is that it doesn’t matter in the slightest.
Noah Blue
First published on Noah Blue, March 2026.
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