A bipartisan group of lawmakers is pressing legislation that would take the unprecedented step of blocking the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) from adopting a rule on how accountants should do their business. The board has proposed that employee stock options be treated as corporate expenses, the way other forms of compensation are, such as salaries and fringe benefits. But the lawmakers -- mostly representing Silicon Valley and other areas with a concentration of high-technology companies, the leaders of the anti-expensing crusade -- want the Securities and Exchange Commission to study the matter -- for three more years. What's that? FASB has only been trying to act on this issue for nearly two decades. (It backed off in 1994 in the face of congressional pressure.) In an astonishing display of lobbying chutzpah, the high-tech industry is now accusing FASB of a rush to judgment.

Whether companies should be required to expense their stock options -- and exactly how these options should be valued -- may be a complicated question, but it is one on which regulators, investors and many corporate leaders seem to be coming down on the same side: in favor of taking the costs into account. They include Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William H. Donaldson and Treasury Secretary John W. Snow. More than 275 companies have started to treat options as expenses, and the International Accounting Standards Board is preparing a final rule to require that treatment. Even the major accounting firms, which once stood shoulder to shoulder with their high-tech employers, now support expensing. While this is a technical matter, it has real-world consequences: During the 1990s, company executives (whose mammoth options holdings meant they stood to make huge profits if stock prices went up) were able to show artificially high earnings by keeping the cost of those options off the books. The high-tech industry, meanwhile, insists that disclosing the value of options elsewhere is adequate, that they can't be valued accurately enough to be properly reflected on the bottom line, and that requiring such treatment would make options unaffordable for companies, hurting employees and imperiling economic growth.

You don't need to know where you come out on this arcane dispute to know who ought to be deciding it -- and who ought to keep their noses out of it. This is a matter for accountants, not politicians, and it would have been handled by the accountants long ago were it not for the political clout (and the campaign checks) of high-technology companies. In the Senate, for example, one of the leading opponents of expensing is California Democrat Barbara Boxer, who this month hosted a "roundtable" discussion of the issue that was largely devoted to bashing FASB. A week earlier a group of Silicon Valley executives had issued an open letter backing Mrs. Boxer's reelection bid and lauding her support for their position on options. Mrs. Boxer and her anti-expensing allies -- including Sens. George Allen (R-Va.) and John Ensign (R-Nev.) and California Reps. David Dreier (R) and Anna G. Eshoo (D) -- ought to leave accounting to the accountants.