When Lord Browne, BP chief executive, presented the oil group's annual results to investors in February, he expressed a rising tide of anger over the effect of new accounting standards.
"Some would argue that International Financial Reporting Standards neither produce a record of the accountability of management, nor a measure of the changes in the economic value of assets and liabilities," he said. "I would agree with them. What IFRS actually does is make our results more difficult to understand."
His words crystallised the discontent of companies. For the first time last week, a powerful coalition of investors - the International Corporate Governance Network - articulated its worries about accounting. And another watershed moment will occur today.
The world's six biggest accounting firms are due to publish proposals - the most comprehensive so far - for a new model of corporate reporting in a bid to press regulators and policymakers into action.
Their ideas, if adopted, would effectively consign 20th century accounting to the dustbin, and free Lord Browne and others from the anachronistic task of presenting static results in line with the cycles of the Gregorian calendar.
"We all believe the current model is broken," said Mike Rake, chairman of KPMG International. "We're not in a very happy situation."
PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst & Young, Grant Thornton and BDO plan to unveil a series of ideas in an unprecedented joint paper today and two points stand out. First, they say quarterly and annual reporting should be superseded by real-time, internet-based reporting, enabling investors to get whatever information they want whenever they want it.
"Such a system should give users the same choices and abilities to access relevant business information as consumers and producers now have when purchasing goods and services over the internet," the paper says.
Investors, the accountants note, would have to accept that more frequent disclosures would come with different levels of assurance from traditional financial statements.
The second proposal is to shift corporate reporting away from purely financial data toward wider information that could provide insight into a company's performance and prospects.
Consider a retailer that reports strong income growth on the back of overseas expansion, say the accountants, but which is nonetheless experiencing a decline in repeat purchases by customers. "The latter statistic could well be the proverbial canary in the mine shaft that would signal to investors the company's stock merits a 'sell' rather than a 'buy'," the paper says. Uncharacteristically for accountants, the paper is long on idealism and short on detail. But the spirit of the proposals is likely to be cheered by investors and analysts.
Many stock marketwatchers already devote hours to deconstructing results and feeding the elements into their own preferred valuation models. An officially endorsed system to help them would be welcome.
Some would argue it already exists in the form of an Extensible Business Reporting Language, which allows corporate data to be "tagged" into different categories. But it has been slow to take off. The greatest resistance to the proposals is likely to come from corporate clients. To companies, quarterly reporting has the advantage of allowing them to craft a careful narrative to accompany their figures.
In a data free-for-all, they would either lose control of the narrative entirely, or be forced to spend an inordinate amount of time responding to analysts, bloggers and journalists.
For accountants themselves, this would signal a radical change to their bread-and-butter business. But the six have confidently identified money-spinning opportunities in the "brave new world" they map out.
Accountants would be needed to audit the technology that produces corporate information and the reliability of "tagging" systems, they say. To tackle fraud more effectively, they suggest all public companies be subject to a costly "forensic audit" akin to a police probe every few years.
