Quand une vertu devient un principe comptable : le cas de la prudence au Royaume-Uni

The prudence principle is one of the pillars of the UK accounting model aimed at avoiding the overstatement of revenues and assets and the understatement of expenses and liabilities. Its main objective is to ensure the reliability of financial statements, by adopting a conservative approach that establishes prudence as a fundamental concept whereby profits are not anticipated, but are recognized in the profit and loss account only when they are realized. Using a historical approach, the aim of this article is to understand the origins of the prudence principle. We show that this principle has its origins in several fields, notably philosophy, business law and taxation. In this article, we first examine the evolution of the concept of prudence in several scientific disciplines, including philosophy, legal theory and economics. We then discuss the importance of prudence to business practice and accounting in 19th-century England. Finally, we show that the definition of this concept has continued to evolve in the Anglo-Saxon world, with the adoption of SSAP 2 in 1971, which imposed "asymmetric prudence" in order to avoid distributing fictitious dividends, then the evolution towards "cautious prudence" with the IASC conceptual framework in 1989, and in the UK with FRS 18 published in 2000. This development reflects a rapprochement with the concept of neutrality advocated by US GAAP.