Detail "No One Stands Still in Public Accounting"   Oleh:  Dennis, Anita Jenis: Article from Bulletin/Magazine Dalam koleksi: Journal of Accountancy vol. 189 no. 6 (2000), page 66. Topik: ACCOUNTING; public accounting Ketersediaan Perpustakaan Pusat (Semanggi) Nomor Panggil: JJ85.10 Non-tandon: 1 (dapat dipinjam: 0) Tandon: tidak ada     Lihat Detail Induk Isi artikel At the turn of the past century, the United States was a country in desperate need of an accounting profession. On one hand, times were good. The nation was becoming a center of industry, moving steadily away from its agricultural past. Railroads had carved shipping and travel lines across the country, the telephone and the light bulb were changing the way people lived, and continuing waves of immigration were bringing new workers and consumers. In the absence of government regulation, however, monopolies were strangling competition and companies ran their businesses with virtually no scrutiny - even from their hapless shareholders. "Before World War I, the most pressing problem in the United States was to restore credibility to balance sheet valuations,” said Gary John Previts and Barbara Dubis Merino in A History of Accountancy in the United States - The Cultural Significance of Accounting. Up until then, companies were reluctant even to share financial data. John Moody, a pioneer financial analyst, noted that “until the early 1890 s, balance sheet secrecy was a distinctive characteristic of financial statement disclosure by railroads,” one of the dominant industries of the period. Robert H. Montgomery, one of the pioneers of the auditing profession, described the difficulty practitioners faced in prying information from companies. "I recall the first time it occurred to me to ask to see the insurance policies covering the stock in process and on hand,” he wrote in Fifty Years of Accountancy. “I might as well have thrown a bomb.” Montgomery said it was not unusual for auditors to be forbidden to see corporate minutes and “many a time I was refused access to subsidiary records.” Getting information was important, according to Previts and Merino, because “two out of three new audit engagements during the 1890 s were likely to reveal defalcations.” This absence of hard data coincided with a period of recurrent economic instability, punctuated by financial panics that cropped up about once a decade. Previts and Merino labeled one such event - in 1893 - one of the most severe depressions in the country’s history. Given such an uncertain beginning, how has the accounting profession fared during its first century of organized existence in the United States ? A reading of contemporary accounts from the turn and the middle of the past century reveals how well the profession reflected the most dynamic activity of the period. Opini Anda Klik untuk menuliskan opini Anda tentang koleksi ini! Kembali

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