The Possibility of a Normative Accounting Standard.

Abstract Accountants have been attempting to establish accounting standards for more than 30 years. However, now one is told, on the basis of what purports to be tight demonstration, that it is impossible to set up normative accounting standards. If the proof stands up, then in all honesty one should abandon for all time the pretense that accounting is a reasoned discipline. For discipline implies a firm body of doctrine and technique which its scholars and practitioners uphold as technically proficient at least and ideal, at best. If it can be shown that there can be no such body of doctrine and technique, accounting should forthwith be struck from the curricula of all institutions of higher learning and the practice of accounting should be removed from the company of learned professions. Certainly there is, as yet, no consensus on what is ideal or technically proficient. But neither was there, just over 200 years ago, any consensus among chemists on the nature and process of combustion. The present confusion in accounting may be resolved in due course, just as the crisis-situations in chemistry, physics, biology and other fields have been resolved. However, the crises will not be resolved if scholar Joel S. Demski's impossibility theorem holds.