Why does accounting fairness remain more of a legal rather than an accounting construct? As news about accounting scandals continue to hit the financial press with unnerving regularity, fears are also mounting that the current crisis is likely to lead to the widespread unravelling of ‘cooked’ financial statements in the next several months as unscrupulous companies find it difficult to sustain ‘evergreening’. See here and here for a couple of high profile corporate accounting and audit failures reported widely over the last month. The magnitude of gaps uncovered in these financial statements leave no doubt about their materiality, raising several questions about the fairness of internal accounting controls and the external audit process. All this has renewed my long-standing interest in a question raised by some towering accounting intellectuals of a bygone era. Accounting legends of an earlier time (for e.g. Leonard Spacek in the case of the American account