Generally Countries Across Assignment Help
Introduction
Generally, countries across the globe especially the developing and less developed countries adopt the accounting standards provided by International Accounting Standard Commission. Since the accounting standards provided by IASC have been primarily developed by leading nations of the world such as USA, UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia; one may wonder if these standards can be applied as they are by the other nations of the world which have completely different social, economic, political culture.
Gray (1998) has developed a framework which talks about the influence of four accounting values (Professionalism versus Statutory Control, Uniformity versus Flexibility, Conservatism versus Optimism and Secrecy versus Transparency.) In this report, we analyse how the Australian Accounting Regulatory System reflects these accounting values in its standards. These accounting values can reinforce authority, information disclosure and measurement of assets and profits in a different manner.
The article will first explain the framework of Gray’s Accounting Values and look at other aspects of these values through a brief literature review and then analyse the Australian accounting Regulatory System by applying the Gray’s Accounting Values followed.
Gray’s theoretical framework of Accounting Values
The framework/model developed by Gray is primarily of the opinion that due to different cultural values of the nations across the world, the accountants from these different nations would apply the same accounting standards in different ways leading to loss of comparability of financial statements across the nations.
Gray’s 4 Accounting Value dimensions can be discussed as below: –
Professionalism versus Statutory Control
This dimension primarily argues that the prime belief about the accountants is that they would give higher importance to their individual judgements and their attitude over compliance with regulatory controls and requirements. In the same dimension, he also thrown light on giving higher priority to principal based rather than rule based accounting standards.
