Abstract
Conventional financial accounting information is slanted in favour of certain economic interests. This paper argues in favour of accounting information capturing and showing relevant aspects of the economicsocial situation, and of decision-making based on it allowing for decisions to be taken with economic-social, and not purely economicweighted, awareness.
Introduction
What is expected or should be expected of a company’s accounting information? Is not accounting information sometimes used as an instrumentalization? Is not the actual accounting system itself already the fruit of such instrumentalization? Is it not at times a totem to legitimize certain situations and results?1
It is said that the accounting system produces the information required by users, but in my view such an affirmation may cloak a fallacy. I would suggest, rather, that the accounting system produces the information required by the accounting system itself, and that this suits some groups, at times to the detriment of others. This self-feeding or vicious-circle-reasoning system is also to be found in our economic system, which does not necessarily produce what society2 needs so much as what the economic system itself needs (production without attention to the social costs thereof, to cite one example).
It is in my view difficult – from an intellectual and non-technocratic stance and without any class links – to accept nowadays a conceptual framework of financial accounting whose sole objective in company accounting information is for it to be useful in assisting certain users to take their economic decisions, the latter being taken in a restricted, short-sighted and self-interested view of what is economic, from the reductive reasoning of homo oeconomicus, as proposed by the FASB (SFAC no. 1) or the IASC (Conceptual Framework). A conceptual framework slanted towards a certain view of the company within the framework of the free-market economic system.
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