While both the European Union and the International Accounting Standards Committee pursue the objective of harmonizing national accounting practices, major differences between national accounting approaches remain. One important difference is between countries like Germany, where a comprehensive binding link between tax and accounting rules is fundamental to the accounting system, and countries like the UK, where there is no such comprehensive link, albeit tax influences may be an important factor in some areas of accounting policy choice.Sweden offers us an unusual example of a country torn between the two approaches, with a formal legal accounting system based on a binding tax-accounting link and a private-sector, standard-setting body seeking to break that link. In this article we report on a study of the debate over the tax-accounting link in Sweden, based on a literature review and interviews with practitioners.