SEC's Chief Accountant to Leave

Here's one that is likely to get less attention than it deserves: the SEC's Chief Accountant is resigning (link). I say prayers of thanks every day I don't have to make my living as an accountant (and so should you--i.e., I would be terrible at it). But as a more-or-less consumer, I've always found the topic fascinating: a market runs, after all, on information, so the nature and quality of the information flow is an issue of the highest priority. Here's CFO.com:

Securities and Exchange Commission chief accountant Conrad Hewitt — after more than two years of an SEC term that saw the rapid push toward international standards, the downsizing of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, and the battle against stock-option backdating — will resign from his post in January.

Hewitt, 72, plans to focus on corporate governance after leaving the SEC, by serving on corporate boards and audit committees. ...

Hewitt was not immune to controversy while at the SEC. He was the top accountant when the commission refused to sign off on FASB's budget until its parent organization, the Financial Accounting Foundation, agreed to SEC demands for more say in the appointment of both FASB members and FAF trustees. Withholding the budget approval in exchange for more authority over appointees was seen as an encroachment by the SEC on FASB's status as an independent standard setter.

The chief accountant also stepped into the credit-crisis fray last month, when he sent a letter to FASB stating the SEC position on allowing companies to delay writedowns on "perpetual preferred securities" that showed paper losses. Hewitt wrote, in answer to a number of inquiries from companies, that issuers may account for the perpetual preferred securities as debt, allowing them to postpone writing down any deterioraton of their value. The SEC's interpretation added to the controversy over the virtues of fair-value accounting, which some critics have blamed, in part, for the global financial crisis and lending freeze.

I'm not sure how to read this: just another tired old guy (as a fellow 72-year-old, I salute him)? Or a man who figures he can do battle better on another front?

I must say, it can't have been fun these past few years to be a person who cares about the quality and integrity of accounting standards--and to have to watch them bruised and bloodied from every quarter. At least we were still shocked by Enron in 2001; in the current uproar, the notion that the books might not tell the truth is more or less accepted as a matter of course. Indeed, so far as I can tell, the only time anyone talks about accounting these days is to complain about mark-to-market, i.e., to complain that the rules tell too much of the truth.