The Accounting Standards Board’s Statement of Principles

Abstract

One of the recommendations of the Dearing report on the setting of accounting standards (the report that gave rise to the new financial reporting regime at the end of the 1980s) was that the successor body to the Accounting Standards Committee (ASC) should develop a statement on the principles that underlie accounting and financial reporting. The ASB separately published a number of draft chapters which, after amendment, were combined in a single exposure draft, issued in November 1995, of the ASB’s ‘Statement of Principles. In a progress paper issued in July 1996, Statement of Principles for Financial Reporting — The Way Ahead: Progress Paper on the Exposure Draft, the ASB announced that the next step would be to issue for comment a revised draft of the Statement of Principles addressing the substantive points raised on the 1995 document. This further draft was issued in March 1999.