Rather than creating new accounting rules, forming the new Public Company Accounting Oversight Board established by Sarbanes-Oxley may be a better approach and help refocus public accountants on core principles and away from more-aggressive and misleading practices. Given human nature and the complexity of many accounting issues, we must expect that rules will sometimes be broken or misapplied.
One is the incorporation of retail stores as bank agent premises. Retail stores can facilitate the population’s access to basic financial transactions, such as deposits, withdrawals and bill payments. In fact, using them is an efficient way to expand the banks’ distribution channels to communities in which it is not profitable to open a branch or even to maintain an ATM.