Abstract The author discusses about the relationship between the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). In 1938, a few years after its establishment, the SEC adopted a fundamental policy that paved the way for the private sector to play a lead role in financial accounting standard setting. The following year, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants Committee on Accounting Procedure issued the first four of the fifty-one Accounting Research Bulletins that it would issue during the next twenty years. During the past nearly fifteen years, the working relationship of the SEC and the FASB has proven to be mutually advantageous, eminently effective, and surprisingly sensible. The success of that relationship is attributable largely to the cooperative spirit of the Commissioners and SEC staff on the one hand and the Board Members and FASB staff on the other. Without the cooperation and support of the SEC, enforcement of the standards established by the FASB would certainly suffer, if not disappear. The primary concern of both groups has been the public interest--in this case most clearly the investing public.
Robert T. Sprouse (Tue,) studied this question.