Accounting for failure

'We can't wait to fix the Financial Accounting Standards Board. It's been broken and it's been broken for too long.' Harvey Pitt, chairman of the SEC, thus revealed his contempt for the body that sets US accounting standards when he testified to the Senate Banking Committee in late March. FASB, it seems, is fair game in the wake of the Enron scandal.But while Pitt may be right to charge FASB with lamentable complacency, he should also be taking a long hard look at the system of national regulation