Accounting Research Bulletin (ARB)

Accounting Research Bulletins, usually abbreviated ARBs, were the pronouncements issued by the Committee on Accounting Procedures of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants between 1939 and 1959. They represent the earliest formal, organized body of United States accounting standards, predating both the Accounting Principles Board and the Financial Accounting Standards Board that followed it.

The Committee on Accounting Procedures was formed in the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash and the accounting failures that contributed to it, as regulators and the accounting profession both recognized the need for more consistent financial reporting rules across US companies. Over its roughly twenty years of operation, the committee issued 51 numbered bulletins addressing practical questions of the day, including inventory valuation, depreciation accounting, and how to present the results of business combinations — many of the same fundamental questions later standard-setters would continue to refine.

Much like its successor the APB, the Committee on Accounting Procedures operated on a part-time basis with members drawn from the practicing profession, and it issued guidance addressing specific problems as they arose rather than working from any single unifying conceptual framework. This piecemeal, reactive approach, combined with concerns about the committee's independence from the firms and companies it regulated, eventually led to its replacement by the Accounting Principles Board in 1959, beginning the chain of successor bodies that eventually produced today's FASB.

Most of the specific guidance contained in the ARBs has long since been superseded by later APB Opinions or FASB Standards, but any ARB provision that was never explicitly replaced technically remains part of generally accepted accounting principles to this day, a quirk of how US accounting standards have accumulated in layers across nearly a century rather than being periodically rewritten from scratch. In practice very few ARB provisions are still actively relied upon, since most of the transaction types they addressed have since been covered more thoroughly by newer, more detailed standards.

The ARBs are mainly of interest today as the starting point in the history of US accounting standard-setting, illustrating how a scattered, inconsistent set of corporate reporting practices in the early twentieth century gradually gave way to the much more structured and comprehensive rulebook that exists under modern GAAP. Accounting history courses typically use the ARB-to-APB-to-FASB progression as the canonical example of how standard-setting bodies evolve toward greater independence and more systematic rule-making over time, and the ARBs themselves are a useful reminder that even today's most routine accounting rules originated as practical answers to real problems companies and auditors were actually facing at the time.

Several areas the ARBs first addressed, including inventory costing methods and the treatment of business combinations, were later revisited in far greater depth by the APB and then the FASB as the transactions companies entered into grew more complex than anything the original committee could have anticipated in the 1940s and 1950s. Rather than being discarded outright, the ARBs' basic conclusions often survived in simplified or modified form inside the newer, more detailed standards that eventually replaced them.