In 2017, I watched the Ben Affleck film The Accountant, only because I thought it might provide material for a blog post: it wasn’t easy, but I did it (capsule takeaway: “To me the film feels largely cluttered and unilluminating, but at least it allows that an accountant might be defined by more than simply being an accountant, by multiple levels of involvement and impact.”). I recently viewed the sequel, The Accountant 2, for the same reason, but this time will have to concede defeat. The “accounting” content is even sparser than in the first film: a speed dating event where Affleck’s character hacks the program to gain an advantage, but then alienates everyone he talks to with his literal-mindedness and talk of deducting depreciation; a nifty bit (although along the lines of one of the niftier bits of the first film) where he asks a business owner some quickfire questions about sales mix and inputs and figures out in no time that the man has more revenue than he can rationally explain and so must be laundering (in classic audit manner, The Accountant gets the rest of the story by beating the guy up). As for the rest, the film is technically proficient and not inartful in its meeting of brutality and relative playfulness, but it’s distancing and largely meaningless.
Talking of movies, I watched the 2005 film The Deal, in which Christian Slater plays an investment banker engaged to provide a fairness opinion on a proposed oil and gas transaction, rapidly learning that there’s more to the transaction than meets the eye, and that the consequences of not delivering as required could be deadly! It’s an interesting enough premise, tapping into ongoing geopolitical complexities, unfortunately handled in dull, superficial or otherwise botched manner. I was amused though by the brazenness of the deal offered to Slater’s character, Tom Hanson: he’s promised a $25 million fee, despite not having the slightest idea of how to assess the transaction in question (the few questions we hear him ask are hilarious in their superficiality, as are the answers he gets, and when he tries to dig even slightly deeper, like trying to understand the basis of the resource estimates they hand him, it’s taken as a sign of not playing ball, triggering such consequences as a bloody animal heart left inside his fridge). For all the film’s weaknesses, it made me think of one of the least appealing aspects of our big-time accounting firms, their willingness to lend their names to feasibility studies or the like in support of some patently political or otherwise dubious initiative (Canada’s recent hosting of the World Cup, an economic bust that any rational person could see coming, is one such example), even in the absence of threats of violence (as far as we know anyway)….
And now, to fill the rest of the space that The Accountant 2 isn’t filling, here’s another collection of offbeat tweets (as they used to be called) that made reference to “IFRS” in one form or another, presented here in their original form, all typos and oddities and possible obscenities intact.
I came across yet another in our long-running series of instances of “IFRS” being used as an acronym for something other than what we all know and love: namely an announcement of the Joint conference – 27th Congress of the International Society for Fibrinolysis and Proteolysis (ISFP/PA) and 28th Workshop of the International Fibrinogen Research Society (IFRS), which took place from September 28, 2025 to October 2, 2025 on the beautiful Greek island of Corfu. Among highlights of the conference: Dr@TimeaFeller from the University of Leeds gave the IFRS Outstanding Junior Investigator Award Lecture on her research investigating the lengthening of fibrin fibres. Good for her!
Someone else made reference to the International Federation of Ridiculous Salarymen (IFRS). I guess that organization won’t be getting anywhere near Corfu.
The following image was captioned: “The world if US GAAP and IFRS had the same accounting/finanical reporting standards”
In response to a photo of Sydney Sweeney confirming that she’s single, someone wrote: Does Sydney fw 5’9” white boys that know the differences between IFRS and US GAAP?
No response was provided. The following photo was captioned: “This is a IFRS household. Get that shit outta here”
And someone even found an IFRS angle on the late Charlie Kirk, sparked by the following video:
An astute commentator wrote: ‘What stands out to me is his use of “highest and best use”, which I recognize as accounting terminology (eg in IFRS 13). Apparently this phrase originated with the economist Irving Fisher. I’ve never heard it used in a moral/theological capacity, but I quite like it.”
Well, that seems like a suitably reflective note to end on…
The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.
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