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IN BUSINESS

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Thursday 8.30-9.00pm,
Sunday 9.30-10.00pm (rpt)

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5听闯耻苍别听2008

Mr Bottom Line

Sir David Tweedie is the most powerful accountant in the world. Don't yawn: as chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board, he is the man who tries to keep global capitalism honest in the face of bubbles, corporate lies, corruption, and huge changes in what companies do and the way they value their businesses. Peter Day hears from Sir David about his ceaseless quest for clarity in a world of often baffling facts and figures.

About this programme by Peter Day

One of the difficulties with a programme called In Business is the name itself: an invitation to switch off, unless the opening seconds manage to snag the attention of the random non business-like listener before he or she can reach the controls.
(We try to make programmes for people who didn鈥檛 realise they were interested in business issues until they heard those first sentences.)

And when the subject of In Business is accountancy, then we really seem to be asking for trouble.

But when we saw that Sir David Tweedie was on the receiving end of a lot of criticism about what he is trying to do to accountancy, and his impact on the current global credit crunch crisis, then we thought it was time to return to a difficult subject.

Accounting is jolly important, and it ought to be possible to explain why if we think hard enough about it. Sir David is the man to make it explainable, one of the clearest and funniest accountants who ever qualified.
For 17 years he has been setting standards for accountants, first nationally in Britain and now as head of the International Accounting Standards Board.

Auditing accounts is not the mechanical mathematics that outsiders probably imagine, but includes many vital judgments by the auditors about how individual company assets ought to be valued, or liabilities distributed.

What Sir David does is to supervise the setting of new standards, rules and principles for accountancy worldwide...a much needed task now that so many companies operate without national borders at all.

It sounds remote from everyday life, but in fact these standards matter because they are the building blocks of corporate life and investment, affecting the way the financial markets behave and the way companies report their profits and losses...to their investors, their customers and the people who work for them.

Sir David has been campaigning for years for much greater transparency and disclosure in company accounts.
And now he鈥檚 under attack from critics who think his insistence that the truth must reflect the current market price of a company鈥檚 assets is making the current financial crisis even worse than it actually is.
He denies that, of course, and defends his position with superb clarity in this In Business.

Listen to Sir David Tweedie, and you may modify your opinion of accountants and what they do.

It鈥檚 more than just counting beans.