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A reconsideration of the nature of stewardship Abstract This paper sets out to question whether it is appropriate to specify stewardship as being the objective of the financial statements. It suggests that the notion of stewardship predates the earliest forms of accounting by hundreds of years. Though early forms of accounting were used for stewardship purposes, the nature of these earliest forms was more akin to management accounting than financial accounting. The paper argues that stewardship cannot be simply transferred over to the financial statements. This is because most users are so divorced from the running of the business they cannot have the appropriate level of knowledge which is required to assess management’s "stewardship" based on what is contained in the financial statements. To claim that the financial statements can be used for stewardship purposes may merely exacerbate the financial statements’ expectations gap. This paper has been published in The Journal of Applied Accounting Research, Vol 4, No 2, 1998, pp61-91 and was presented at the BAA National Conference, Cardiff, 27-29 March 1996.
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