Abstract
This paper reviews the debate on the accounting treatment of goodwill between the publication of the Accounting Standards Committee’s Discussion Paper of 1980 and the issue by the Accounting Standards Board in 1997 of FRS 10. It considers the responses to six discussion/working papers and exposure drafts, analysing the pattern of respondents and reviewing the consistency of the representations submitted, the arguments employed and their development at each stage of the debate. Submissions were found to vary greatly in quality, ranging from well-argued, coherent documents maintaining a consistent outlook over time to poorly-argued responses and submissions involving unexplained inconsistencies with the respondent’s previous stance. Considerable overlap was found with arguments used in the explanatory notes of accounting standards; almost all of the types of argument used by the ASC to justify any accounting standard showed up on one side or the other of the goodwill debate. The resulting standard is better understood in the context of the very wide range of arguments brought to bear on this complex debate.
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