For the record, I respect all the hard work done by FASB members and staffers. But a recent "FASB Update," a monthly roundup of rulemaking activity, scolds the press for daring to suggest that U.S. GAAP has a weight problem.

Contrary to press accounts, says the update, GAAP is not "an ever-growing, massive body of work encompassing tens of thousands of pages." Rather, the FASB Codification -- which is a major reorganization and categorization of generally accepted accounting principles -- contains a mere "2,900 pages of content."

That's a far cry indeed from pre-Codification GAAP, which by some counts hit 12,000 pages, thanks to a surfeit of FASB, AICPA and SEC information. But it's still heftier than international financial reporting standards, which weigh in at 2,500 pages. Moreover, international standards were recently slimmed down to a supermodel-thin 230 pages when the IASB released IFRS for small and midsize businesses.

(By the way, the new codification is organized by subject rather than rule numbers. That makes more sense in the long run, but the immediate effect is that I have to deprogram my brain to remember to forget the old numbering system. For example, FAS 5 is now Topics 30 through 114, and then a whole bunch of other topic numbers between 116 and 203, right?)

FASB can be proud of its weight-loss program for accounting standards. Indeed, having shed as many as 9,000 pages from U.S. GAAP, it deserves to be praised as the Biggest Loser. But there is still more slimming to do.

But every now and then a case comes along that gives us deeper insight into the issue -- like the lawsuit filed Thursday by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo against former Bank of America CFO Joe Price. Price and ex-CEO Ken Lewis are accused of failing to disclose billions of dollars in losses at acquiree Merrill Lynch during the month leading up to the BofA shareholder vote. That vote OK'd the $50 billion purchase of "the thundering herd."

Lewis and Price claim they didn't do anything wrong, but they cannot claim to have been uninformed about Merrill's deteriorating financials. Price was "intimately familiar" with Merrill's deteriorating condition, the lawsuit says, "because he had a practice of reviewing and commenting on real-time reports of actual losses from Merrill's internal systems."

The suit notes that Merrill had a project, called "Accelerate the Close," whose design was to speed up Merrill's book-closing practices to align them with BofA's. As a result, management knew before the early December 2008 merger vote that Merrill had as much as $16 billion in losses coming for the fourth quarter. As one staffer said in an e-mail to the chief accounting officer at BofA, "This has gone amazingly well.... The acceleration of the P&L went as smoothly as possible."

So the IT systems worked -- and did so in a period of crisis and across companies. Amazing. But, according to the lawsuit, management didn't act on the information. Why didn't Price disclose the losses before the shareholder vote? There was enormous pressure to complete the deal, some of it by way of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. More important, though, the incident raises a question for all CFOs: is it the failure of information systems that needs more attention, or the failure to act on information?

The psychologist B.F. Skinner once said, "The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do." CFOs have to ask themselves: If I had all the data I wanted, would I have the courage to act on it and disseminate it to my superiors, even if it were negative and doing so would make me unpopular?

It sounds basic, sure. Nevertheless, the real inhibitor to better business intelligence may not be in our IT systems, but in ourselves.

It's good to see the BIS turning proactive. That's because banks' risk-management functions are still not sturdy enough to avert another crisis.

Before the holidays, Ernst & Young, in conjunction with the Institute of International Finance (IIF), a lobbying group, surveyed banks worldwide on the progress they have made in improving risk management and governance. The answers are not good news for companies worried about counterparty risk in their banking relationships.

Gaps in the risk-control framework of financial institutions remain very wide, according to bankers; the risk function still doesn't have much of a say on major strategic decisions and new products, for example. What's more, boards of directors are still insufficiently versed in banks' risks to be able to challenge how top management handles those risks. (So the goal of improving governance from the top by having the board establish a clear risk appetite is still a work in progress.)

And to no one's surprise, banks are still having a hard time producing a daily view of counterparty exposures across product lines. Obtaining such views takes a few days, even in a crisis situation, according to one banker.

Finance chiefs were noted only once in the survey: U.S. bankers said there was a marked increase in the involvement of the CFO in assisting with fair valuation of structured products. While that's progress, it may also suggest that CFOs still lack a broader say in market and credit risk management.

What we wrote almost two years ago remains true: it could take years for banks to view risk through a companywide lens and establish an environment in which the CFO and risk officer communicate regularly. In the meantime, it behooves nonfinancial CFOs -- and regulators -- to continue to cast a cold eye on financial-services firms' risk exposures.

In a recent speech at West Point, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt charged that American business has lost sight of what makes for a successful economy. The United States, he noted, has changed from "a technology-based, export-oriented powerhouse to a services-led, consumption-based economy." Businesses should be investing more in technology and innovation, he said. (Presumably not the kind of innovation that GE invested in when it bought a subprime mortgage lending outfit, WMC Mortgage, in 2004.)

What Immelt failed to mention is that businesses need capital to become innovation powerhouses again. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, lending for innovation isn't a top priority for providers of capital these days -- no matter that many have been scorched by structured-finance products.

In a survey on innovation from Accenture that polled vice presidents, directors, and managers at 640 large U.S. and U.K. companies, responses from executives at banks and capital-market firms stood out. More than two-thirds of those execs said their organizations prioritize short-term financial results over investing for the long term. Very few saw innovation playing an important role in efforts to increase operational efficiencies and reduce costs. And more so than executives in any other industry, they characterized their quest for innovation as searching for the next "silver bullet" rather than "a diverse pursuit of new opportunities."

This should worry CFOs. Such attitudes and goals don't fit with lending to technology-oriented, innovative companies that require long-term capital investment. If banks are focusing on short-term profits, they're not really interested in extending firms a five-year line of credit. And if bank executives don't think innovation has much to do with operational efficiencies, they're unlikely to put much energy and resources into corporate lending -- it already earns poor margins, after all.

An article in the McKinsey Quarterly about the consulting firm's research on IT departments got me thinking about all those surveys where most respondents rate themselves as better than average — they think they're nicer than the average person, or more ethical, or whatever. According to one recent (and particularly preposterous) poll, about 50% of male baseball fans said they could have made the majors if only they'd had better coaching and a break or two.

What's interesting is that the IT executives surveyed by McKinsey resoundingly break that mold. In fact, they seem to have something of an inferiority complex.

With the 444 respondents split about evenly between chief information officers and chief technology officers on the one side and non-IT executives on the other, who do you think has a rosier view of IT's performance? Why, the non-techies do. More than half (55%) think their geeky colleagues are doing very well or extremely well at providing technology services. Two-thirds find the performance on high-value activities like on-time/on-budget project delivery to be at least somewhat effective.

Yet, slightly less than half of the technology execs say their infrastructure management is extremely or very effective, just 30% say the same for their IT governance, and a mere 21% are happy with their ability to target places in the organization where IT can add value.

This year's terrible economy certainly hasn't helped their egos. In six out of six categories of IT self-assessment, scores plunged compared with those tallied in McKinsey's last such survey a year ago.

Strangely enough, the gap between IT's view of itself and company leaders' view of the tech department is widest where business and IT strategy are tightly integrated and have mutual influence on one another. Only 16% of the respondents say that description applies to their companies. But among those, 66% of business leaders identify IT as performing effectively (i.e., they give ratings of extremely or very effective in at least three of the assessment categories), compared with 46% of IT leaders.

What gives? Are IT executives so driven that they rate anything less than perfection as ineffective? Are business leaders techno-ignorant to the point where they don't realize how lousy things are? Whatever the case, it would be nice if the two groups harmonized. After all, how can IT systems be expected to maximize their value if no one agrees on just how much value they provide?