We investigate one episode of the “financialization” of accounting: the debate over the “correct” method to discount defined benefit (DB) pension plan liabilities for US public sector financial reporting. We outline this issue from the pre-agenda, agenda-setting and alternatives selection phases of the standard setting process, through to the policy decision made by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) in 2012. We find that one group of 15 individuals, which we propose acted as an epistemic community (EC) that was focused on financial economic theory, was disproportionally influential in all phases of the standard setting process, despite its small size. Ideas do not spontaneously travel from one jurisdiction (e.g., financial economics) to another (e.g., accounting) without agency. We thus add a focus on the carriers of ideas to the literature on accounting standard setting, which has so far predominantly examined this process from the standpoint of interests and institutions. We argue that framing theory helps to both empirically identify the hierarchies of the EC, but further helps to make visible the values and assumptions made by agents of financialization who push towards the adoption of financial computation techniques presented as axiologically neutral.

Introduction

They [the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, GASB] are also being bombarded by public officials and a large share of the actuarial profession with misleading – but “good sounding” – arguments …. I look at it this way: imagine a sentient creature from another planet landed on the earth, and had no understanding of our system of mathematics. We decide to teach them math. But rather than teaching them math by standard instruction, we do it by debate. So we have a MIT-trained mathematician patiently explain why 1 + 1 = 2. On the other side, we had a Harvard-trained lawyer (someone really smart, but with a totally different area of expertise, and, in this hypothetical example, not particularly good at math) argue that 1 + 1 = 3. This alien creature would have the alien equivalent of cognitive dissonance, and then resolve it by “compromising” and learning that 1 + 1 = 2.5. (Brown, 2011) This article’s opening quotation illustrates the tension between the two main sides in a debate over an accounting standard, with its imaginary example suggesting how combining two very different technical approaches can lead to an illogical conclusion. The debate in question concerned the method used to discount defined-benefit (DB) pension plan liabilities for US public-sector financial reporting. We examine this debate – and more specifically, the carriers of its underlying ideas – from its initial emergence in a small group of epistemic actors in the late 1980s through to a policy decision made by the GASB in 2012. We find that one group of individuals, which we argue acts as an epistemic community (henceforth EC), was disproportionally influential in all the stages of this standard-setting process, despite its small size (the EC’s core set of members only comprises 15 individuals). Accounting, as we know, is made up of ideas drawn from elsewhere (Miller, 1988). One of the motivations for borrowing ideas from elsewhere is to ‘modernize’ accounting practice (Miller, 1988, p. 606), and one of the ways this modernization takes place is through standardsetting. One recent example of the updating of accounting practice and regulation is fair value accounting, an instance of accounting practice increasingly drawing upon market value and financial economics for measurement. In this article, we take the fair value approach to definedbenefit pension accounting as one empirical example of the broader phenomenon of accounting change. Our primary aim is to focus on the ideas which hold support for fair value accounting together, highlighting the carriers of these ideas in a particular instance of accounting change.