Less than a month after Texas passed a law blocking a new accounting rule, Connecticut has picked a fight with the independent board that tells state and local governments how to report their financial affairs.

The state is poised to enact a bill that would empower its comptroller to diverge not just from one accounting rule, but from all of them.

Texas merely wanted to opt out of a new rule that requires governments to disclose how much they will have to pay for retired workers’ health care. The Connecticut bill would give the state comptroller the legal authority to set “generally accepted accounting principles” for the state’s financial reports — a function that belongs to the Governmental Accounting Standards Board.

With five words — accounting “as prescribed by the comptroller” — the bill is posing a challenge to the board, which appears increasingly under attack.

The standards board is the only body that sets uniform standards for states and local governments to use when reporting their finances to the municipal bond markets. But the board is strapped for cash, relying on both the donations and the good faith of the governments that adopt its rules voluntarily. A prominent association of government financial officials has even called for it to be dismantled.

The Connecticut bill passed the House a week ago and is now before the state Senate.

Although the bill potentially goes farther than the one in Texas, lawmakers in Hartford are not mounting the kind of frontal assault that Austin did. The Texas Legislature held hearings in which critics testified that the new accounting rule was flawed, did not reflect conditions in Texas’s labor markets and might prompt governments to curtail their health plans. Some Texas lawmakers even questioned the legitimacy of the standards board.

In Connecticut, by contrast, there have been no hearings, and proponents of the bill say that far from wanting to defy the accounting board, they want to further its work.

The problem, they say, is that the board generates rules that make it hard to balance the budget every year — like many states, Connecticut has a law requiring a balanced budget — by forcing legislators to grapple with long-term debts and other noncash items. The bill is supposed to help by giving lawmakers the flexibility to look only at current cash outlays and avoid getting bogged down in everything else.

“I’m trying to get this state back onto the right accounting principles and to do its accounting and budgeting in the right way, and the only way I can do that is by this piece of legislation,” the state comptroller, Nancy S. Wyman, said in an interview.

She said that Connecticut passed a law in 1993 requiring it to use the accounting rules issued by the governmental board. But the Legislature has delayed putting the rules into effect, because it could not come up with the money. On many occasions it has lacked the means to pay for critical programs, like Medicaid or certain payroll expenses, she said, so it carried them as deficit expenditures.

After 14 years, the state had accumulated a total deficit of about $1 billion, she said. Adopting the standard board’s rules would mean somehow finding a way to pay it down at the rate of about $150 million a year. And lawmakers scrambling to come up with money for tangible programs like schools and highways were simply not interested in “coming up with $150 million a year for good accounting purposes,” she said.

Ms. Wyman said she thought that if she could just get the accounting flexibility to clear those daunting numbers out of the picture, she could persuade the legislators to pay down the $1 billion debt a little bit at a time, and thus adopt the accounting standards gradually.

“We’re definitely not doing what Texas is doing,” she added. By standing up to the standards board in public hearings, Texas drew criticism from accounting experts and may have put its creditworthiness at risk of being downgraded.

But the accounting board, which is located in Norwalk, Conn., does not like Connecticut’s quiet confrontation any more than it liked the noisy rebellion in Texas. Robert J. DeSantis, the president and chief operating officer of the Financial Accounting Foundation, warned Ms. Wyman in a letter that the pending bill could “undermine the G.A.S.B.” and “would put the state at risk.”

The foundation is the nonprofit parent of both the governmental accounting board and its sister, the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which writes the accounting rules for companies.

“The proposed Connecticut legislation is a threat to integrity and objectivity of the standard-setting process,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It is a step backwards for public trust, government accountability and transparency.”

Ms. Wyman said she did not intend to use nonstandard accounting in Connecticut’s financial statements, only for preparing the budget.

But Mr. DeSantis said the bill would give the comptroller the power to stray from the standards in both instances.

He proposed a revision, but so far the Senate has not adopted the change. The bill is expected to pass before the Legislature adjourns Wednesday.