--- "j.f. noonan" <jfn1 at msc.com> wrote: > On Tue, 8 May 2001,
[iso-8859-1] Double Dog D**2 wrote:
> >
> > The profession which has resisted capitalism the best, so
> > far, is of course that of accountancy.
>
> Eh? My on-going fascination with accountants usually peaks
> this time of year (our new fiscal year began 1-mar) as the
> auditors from a Big-X[1] accounting firm set up shop in a
> conference room, install their own mini-lan, and begin
> terrorizing the in-house accounting department.
>
> So I am quite curious what you mean by "accountancy his
> resisted
> capitalism". Do you mean that bean counters count beans
> whether
> under mercantilism, capitalism, or communism? Or what?
>
Yup, that's about it. And it goes further back than that -- the men who compiled the Domesday Boke were accountants, and there are cuneiform tablets which prove that the Babylonians had such a thing as discounted cashflow analysis.
The guys setting up in your shop are the purest form of accountant existing today - the auditor. An accountant is, by his nature, a recorder of transactions, a person who puts together the records of what moved where when. Like any other profession, what separates him from the rest of the proleteriat is partly his technical skill and partly his social role.
The technical skill of the accountant is largely in the allocation of transactions to time periods and in the consolidation of separate books. His social role is that he is independent -- like a doctor or lawyer, part of his role is to be entirely discreet and trustworthy. The UK Companies Act sums it up best -- his role is to give a "true and fair view" of what has happened in a year.
The internal accounting department of your firm are closer to the historical role of the accountant than the auditors -- audit is really something which only came into its own in the joint stock company era, and historically most accounting work of the double-entry book-keeping era was carried out by employees of a syndicate for the members of that syndicate. However, they have gone beyond the austere values of their profession to the extent that they have become entangled in the management of the firm. There are two conflicting roles at work in any person going by the title "Finance Director". On the one hand, he is responsible for the measurement of the company's finances; on the other hand, for their optimisation. When he acts in the first role, he is a professional in the truest sense (and the sense in which Marx appears to use the word). In the second role, he is a capitalist, or an agent of capitalists and has gone beyond his professional role just as surely as a doctor has when he signs up to an HMO, or an academic when he launches a "vocational" course.
Most degraded at all from this viewpoint, are those individuals who will be working alongside the auditors, who often hold letters after their name indicating qualifications in accountancy, but who go by the name of "consultants". Unfortunately, it is a truism that one manages what one measures, so it is all too easy for those who measure to start forming opinions about management. Typically, these are the people who are pejoratively referred to as "bean-counters", when of course they are nothing of the sort. To count beans is a perfectly honourable activity; not a glamorous one, but one which is not harmful to anybody, and highly useful to anyone who cares about keeping track of their beans, which is to say, everyone, in one way or another. To start advising about how many beans need to be fed to which servants to give them the strength to get up in the morning is quite clearly another business entirely.
I say that the _profession_ of accountancy has resisted the encroachment of capitalism, because although individual accountants have obviously peeled off to join the bourgeoisie in their droves, the standards of the profession itself have resisted being warped far better than most others. You will not find an accountant's equivalent of the legal personality of corporations, or of judging teachers by the post-graduation salaries of their students or any such. The idea that accounts exist in order that "shareholder value" be maximised and measured is less than ten years old, and is still looked on as a bizarre innovation in many circles. In general, accountants still, as far as I can ascertain (and I know a fair few of that breed), regard themselves as being involved in the activity of measuring and recording physical activity and transactions, rather than of serving any particular end. Which often makes bog-standard, bean-counting auditors rather refreshing company.
dd
===== ... in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. -- Bertrand Russell
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