Self-referential Lobbying of the Accounting Standards Board: The Case of Financial Reporting Standard No 1

This paper employs a Latourian framework to analyse the informal and formal lobbying of the Accounting Standards Board (ASB) over its flagship standard on cash flow statements. The purpose of the analysis is to reveal how the self-referential rhetoric of key lobbyists, such as companies and auditors, was used to “enrol” the ASB into amending its standard in line with the transformative practices of some large companies. The issue of whether net debt should be included on cash flow statements is analysed in detail, as it reveals how a small group of companies were able to enrol the ASB into accepting their translated definition of “cash”. The paper concludes that, given that the ASB essentially relies on voluntary compliance, it responded to the rhetoric of key allies in the standard-setting process in order to maintain its position as an obligatory passage point and so retain support for its project to reform accounting.