The Accounting Miscellany blog by Peter Clark (whom I thank upfront for inspiring the following big finish to the year) contained the following fascinating item:

• There is a strange but persistent rumour that IAS 1 Presentation of Financial Statements was written by Sir Henry Benson (later Lord Benson), the first chairman of the IASB’s predecessor, the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC). If true, this would have been a remarkable feat. Benson’s term as IASC chairman finished in 1976 and he died in 1995. The IASC didn’t finalize and publish IAS 1 until 1997…

• The people spreading this bizarre rumour may be confusing two successive Standards, both labelled IAS 1 but covering vastly different subject matter:
  • IAS 1 Disclosure of Accounting Policies was published in 1974. As the title indicates, this dealt only with disclosure of accounting policies.
  • IAS 1 Presentation of Financial Statements was published in 1997. This much more comprehensive standard prescribes many general aspects of how to prepare financial statements, and of presentation and disclosure in financial statements…

• Would it matter if Benson had written the version of IAS 1 published in 1997, or the revised versions published in 2003 and 2007? I don’t think so. But some people invented this rumour and keep repeating it, so evidently they think it does matter. Anyway, the factual timeline clearly disproves this absurd rumour.

A commenter called the rumour “one of many ill-informed myths which ignores the realities of the world and, in particular, standard setting.” The realities of my own world, I know, are pretty dull and narrow, located far away from the action: the only rumours I ever hear are about person X having been fired rather than quitting, or about person Y actually being an even bigger asshole than everyone’s always known them to be, that kind of thing. Clark’s post captured my imagination (the more deranged side of it no doubt) less for the issue itself (I’d certainly never heard nor – I swear! – repeated that crazy story, nor indeed any other Benson-related story) than for the broader idea of moving in a circle in which such an esoteric and rarified matter would be a recurring subject of any conversation, let alone of misinformed conversation; in which it could possibly be persistent. I thus started to feel my life is distinctly impoverished, rumour-wise, and – inspired by the example – briefly tried to spice things up by spreading a few historical absurdities of my own (that Henry VIII had a seventh wife; that onions were first cultivated by Ludwig van Beethoven; that Jane Austen was one of the Bronte Sisters), all of which completely failed to take off. I’m not giving up, though and I’m coming clean right now for readers of this blog: if you hear any of the following IFRS-related rumours in 2024, they started here!

• While Sir Henry Benson (later Lord Benson) didn’t write IAS 1, he did ghost-write several of the James Bond novels credited to Ian Fleming (the lesser ones, most likely).

• Every single person who worked on IAS 20 came to a mysterious and premature end.

• Australia never actually adopted IFRS – they only claimed that they did to make themselves look good. They correctly reasoned that they were far enough away from the rest of the world to get away with it.

• Many of the earliest IAS standards were peer-reviewed by Hollywood actor Burt Reynolds.

• IFRS 9 has twice been a close runner-up for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

• If you sit down and go through them with a calculator, forty per cent of audited IFRS statements don’t even come close to balancing.

• The last two Chairs of the IASB, Hans Hoogervorst and Andreas Barckow, are actually the same person. He gets away with the subterfuge through a mix of modern technology and old-fashioned trickery (voice projection, puppets, mirrors, trapdoors).

• The whole of IFRS is programmed to self-explode at the last second of December 31, 2029.

• Many copies of the 2015 edition of the IFRS red book had to be recalled after it was discovered that a prankster had replaced IFRS 3 with extracts from a “Paleo Cookbook for Beginners.”

• Supermodel Linda Evangelista briefly dated at least three former IASB members.

• Scientists have conclusively proved that if IFRS had not already been invented at this point in human history, there would be no possibility of it being invented in the future.

• Many ISSB members privately concede that sustainability reports look and feel better when they’re prepared using dirty energy sources.

I’ll tell you, even though my memory and my conscience and my sense of the realities of the world (and in particular standard-setting) tell me that I made all of those up, I have a deep feeling that at least a couple of them are actually true. If only the late Burt Reynolds were still around to comment. Well, happy new year!

The opinions expressed (and, for the most part, the I assume convincingly-presented facts) are solely those of the author.