Extractive industry financial accounting : where to from here?

By far the most important, difficult and complex policy issue to resolve in the context of the extractive industry concerns the accounting for preproduction costs and mineral reserves, and the disclosure of relevant supplementary data about them. The accounting profession has been unable to settle this particular issue, except in the most contrived of senses. Indeed, many consider the issue to be unresolvable. This paper focuses on the primary financial statements and proposes a partial solution to the issue. The Proposed Method describes a set of new procedures and primary financial statements that are intended to be more serviceable and possess greater predictive power than is currently the case.