Mr. Tim Bush:

The purpose of the true and fair view is that, effectively, common sense should prevail irrespective of what is written down in a codified form as to how one produces a set of accounts, and one must not interpret those rules to come up with the wrong answer. One must deliver the right answer. The best analogy is that if one follows a recipe for cooking an omelette but ends up with scrambled eggs, one has not made an omelette. One has put in the correct ingredients but made a mess of it. In the past 20 years, elements of the accounting profession tried to change the meaning of true and fair view to whatever they wanted it to mean. It was a sort of à la cartetype of true and fair view which was disconnected from company law. It looked about okay, and then people spoke to a few others and asked whether this kind of accounting looked okay, but very often they would not talk to qualified accountants. They talked to analysts or people who did not really know what they were talking about. That would give rise to what I call a distorted output that clearly does not give what the Senator or I would regard as a true and fair view but passes off as such.

Another problem is that if someone in the Department of Finance has a technical problem, he or she will very often pick up the telephone to one of the four accounting firms, who have all got the message right, and really it is always the same person at the end of the telephone. I can almost pin down some of the excuses I have come across to the precise building because I can pick up on the tone, and somebody would not come up with the same ridiculous excuse twice by accident unless it was the same person putting out the same bad excuse.