What is the Nigerian Accounting Standards Board (NASB) about?
The agency is a Federal Government parastatal, responsible for writing accounting rules for companies. These rules are followed by people preparing financial statements for corporate organisations. For instance, if you give 10 accountants a set of transactions from one company and fail to give them rules to follow, they will come out with different results. So you need a set of rules that would enable them to arrive at a good result. To what extent has the standards issued helped companies in preparing their financial statements? Up till now, we have issued 30 accounting standards for companies. Also, the NASB has intervened in some specific situations. In 1990, we issued accounting standards for banks when the industry was having serious problems. This helped in sanitising the financial reporting system in the banking industry. We also issued accounting standards for the petroleum industry. The standards were meant for companies operating in the downstream and upstream sectors. The de
