Professor Eamonn Walsh:

There is an amount of guidance in here. This book is called Principles Based Accounting. The equivalent US rules would be about five times the size of this book. The US rules are much more specific and would have much more detailed requirements about disclosures of concentrations of credit risk in published financial statements and much more detailed disclosure about what listed entities should do. International accounting standards do not have that level of detailed requirement and then the opportunities for creating particular impressions for being able to slice up a transaction in particular ways, for example, to say that part of it was a UK exposure and part of it was an Irish exposure and, particularly, given Northern Ireland it would allow one to represent things as if concentrations were a lot less than it appeared.