Corporate capers, group accounting reforms

ABSTRACT Histories of business firms, mergers and takeovers, disputes, frauds and failures have proven fruitful in observing whether accounting generally produces serviceable information in applied commercial settings. We contribute to this literature by drawing on John Preston’s 2021 biography of Robert Maxwell, and earlier biographies of the media baron, juxtaposed with evidence in Frank Partnoy’s account of the 1920s larger-than-life Swedish engineer, businessman and financier Ivar Kreuger. Cameos of other business histories are interposed to suggest these cases are not outliers. Both oversaw what was referred to as an unexpected company failure. While their founder manager actions suggest that there is nothing new under the sun, there are enduring deficiencies in the group information disclosed to interested parties using malleable standards-based accounting, especially conventional consolidation accounting. These weaknesses are known to regulators and accounting standard setters but remain effectively unaddressed. The wheeling and dealing of Maxwell and Kreuger provide the commercial equivalent of a laboratory setting, with evidence suggesting circumvention of the separate legal entity notion within corporate groups, impeding effective regulatory and governance controls. Using a hypothetical, worked example, an alternative group accounting system illustrates how disclosure of additional, more serviceable group information to interested parties would likely provide a check on the actions of a dominant manager, and further, provide a greater likelihood of identification of a company failure trajectory.