The Lawless

Perpetual intrusions and cyberattacks suggest that in the battle between hackers and governments, democratic governments are losing. If they fail to do better, the balance of power will tip even more in favor of harmful actors, private companies, and authoritarian regimes. But if they succeed, then a new raft of democratically mandated measures could tame the lawlessness in cyberspace. That, in turn, would restore confidence that a liberal, rules-based order can prove its relevance in the digital age.

The Lawless

Why am I making light humor of accountants with a metaphor of them as cowboys? It is because they operate today in a lawless frontier no different than the Wild West. To be clear, I am not referring to accountants performing external financial or tax accounting. For those two disciplines there are many regulatory laws to protect investors, bankers, and government agencies. I am referring to the lawless frontier of internal managerial accounting used for internal analysis and decision making.

So, for you cowboy accountants who are operating in the lawless frontier, you may discover there may be a new sheriff in town. You may no longer get away with reporting flawed and misleading information to your users and violating universal costing principles. (Now what the accounting industry needs is enforcement for managerial accounting, but that is an advanced topic for another article.)