Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACT
The purpose of this study is to provide additional data and insight regarding the recent history of Barrow, Wade, Guthrie & Company (BWGC) by T. Flesher, D. Flesher, and Previts (2023). BWGC was a national public accountancy firms founded by British accountants in the U.S. in 1883. It merged with a global firm in 1950. The study provides information about 62 British accountants who had immigrated to the U.S. by the outbreak of World War I and subsequent employment with BWGC. The study includes additional data on the main BWGC founder and illustrates biographical discrepancy due to use of secondary sources.

ABSTRACT
Recent comments on the FASB preference for the asset-liability focus in its conceptual framework motivate this historical perspective on the early accounting tension between it and the alternative revenue-expense focus. The commentary identifies and reviews significant pre-1980s studies indicative of focus preference and finds pre-FASB lack of consensus on the issue. The commentary concludes that this lack of consensus will continue in the absence of a coherent body of abstract knowledge that is capable of giving professional authority to mandated accounting standards.

ABSTRACTThis research note uses a city directory to identify and contextualize early practitioners in what later became the first organized professional community of public accountants in the English-speaking world. It comments more generally on the use of such a directory as an archival source for accounting history research.

ABSTRACTThis study examines a Scottish public accountant's association with West India slavery during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It provides a hitherto unresearched perspective on the association of accounting and accountants with slavery and contributes to an ongoing debate about Scotland's association with slavery.

Text: I've heard tons of rumors that my history teacher is a CIA agent because he grew up in Panama on a government compound and his wife is a recruiter for the CIA and when they went to Washington DC for close up field, they flew separately, his daughter was "sick" the whole time, and they only saw him like once the whole trip. So, I mean, it seems like maybe he wasn't just looking at the tourist stuff, so. And he's super smart, like I feel like he could be doing a lot more with his knowledge base then just teaching kids. I first heard about this like last year, but I've heard it a lot more recently, since the DC trip. If it was true I'd be a little surprised that kids were right about it, but at the same time it would make sense, like I wouldn't be THAT surprised, ya know

The first and most specific purpose of this paper is to contrast the private and public lives of a founder of modern public accountancy to illustrate the ambiguity of an outlier in the history of a professional project. A second and more general purpose is to use the founder's personal history to identify archival issues in biographical accounting research. A historical outlier such as Scottish Chartered Accountant David Souter Robertson (DSR) demonstrates how research of the professional project of Victorian public accountants is enhanced by the inclusion of private as well as public aspects of their lives. Set in the context of the early British public accountancy associations and unsuccessful outliers among their members, the study of DSR focuses on his insolvency at a time when the newly formed associations were facing the issue of setting ethical standards to cope with unsuccessful outliers in their professional projects. The case of DSR illustrates specific problems facing accounting biographers when accessing public archives of the Victorian period.

This Comment will first examine the history and current state of laws regulating water use in the United States, and the commercial uses that are the target of the proposed Water Excise Tax. The next step will be to discuss the tax itself from several perspectives: First, its constitutionality, structure, and application in the framework of existing water law; second, its advantages and disadvantages based on its regulatory nature and scope; and finally, the normative benefits of indirect regulation. The theses underlying all of these sections are that public drinking water will become scarce in the very near future, that indirect regulation through the Water Excise Tax will help solve the problem of water availability, and that such regulations will provide the government with funds to ensure that the public supply of drinking water does not dry up in our lifetimes.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate use of archival material to access a hidden voice in accounting history and provide social context in the form of a biographical micro-history of public accountancy. The archival material is a letter written in 1846 by a Scottish teenage public accountancy clerk. An analysis of the letter gives insight to the employment and social life of the clerk in mid-19th century Scotland and also identifies a notorious character in Scottish public accountancy. The paper reveals the importance of social connections, religion, communication, and transport to middle-class Victorian Scots and, more generally, reminds accounting historians of the value of hidden voices and micro-histories.