America's next top accountant Convergence man (Apr 24th 2013, 18:35 BY R.L.G. | NEW YORK )
RUSSELL GOLDEN will become perhaps the world's most important accountant on July 1st. As the incoming chairman of the 7-person Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), he will lead rulemaking for America's beancounters.
Mr Golden succeeds Leslie Seidman, whose tenure as FASB's chairwoman was a short three years; board members may serve for a maximum of ten, and Ms Seidman's time was up. Mr Golden was chosen after a search that included more than a hundred candidates, a spokesman said. In the end, the trustees chose a consummate insider. Mr Golden has been on the board since 2010; before that, he was the head of the technical staff.
This matters. Setting accounting standards has become heavily politicised in recent years. Mr Golden's counterpart abroad is Hans Hoogevorst, the Dutchman who chairs the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). IASB sets rules for about a hundred countries. Mr Hoogevorst is not an accountant himself, but a former finance minister and securities-market regulator. His role has been a heavily public one, jawboning countries into accepting IASB standards without fiddling them too much to account for local conditions. The whole point of IASB's International Financial Reporting Standards is comparability between companies and countries. Achieving comparability has also been the motivation for a long project of convergence between FASB's and IASB's standards. They have already made much progress in making American and international financial statements apples and apples. But a few key differences remain. Chief among them is how to account for loans that begin to go bad on the books of a bank or other company. The two boards have announced different proposals after trying for a long time to harmonise them. They remain hard at work on this and other convergence projects.
Mr Golden mentioned the importance of convergence several times in the press conference announcing his selection. It seemed a subtle shift of tone from that of his predecessor. Ms Seidman was often at pains to insist that FASB would not compromise what it thought to be the best standard for America in order to get to a converged but imperfect international standard. Mr Golden said much the same, but repeatedly returned to his hopes for convergence. On loan-loss provisioning, he reminded reporters that FASB and IASB had been publicly at daggers drawn on other issues before coming together. In other words, the convergence project, which has seemed to flag, may have a vigorous champion in Mr Golden.