Even retired professors get holidays but while cruising along the Rhine my choice of reading was on the lighter side and, since I came home, the recent very hot weather has made it difficult to concentrate on anything that deserves significant intellectual effort, like Philip Augar's "The Bank that Lived a Little" or Jesse Norman's "Adam Smith: What he Thought and Why it Matters", both of which are waiting on my desk.
But I had reserved Richard Brooks' "Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How they Broke Capitalism" from the local library so when it arrived I thought I should at least open it. Not that I imagine there will be such a queue of other eager readers that I won't be able to renew it but you never know in Oxford.
I confess that having read an extract somewhere I was expecting this book to irritate me, so the act of reserving it and paying £1.20 to do so was possibly masochistic. I began by looking at the index: how could a book about accountants not include any reference to my hero Sir David Tweedie? And then I looked at the acknowledgements and sighed a little that the names listed were all from the critical wing of both academia and the profession, such as it is. Puffs on the back cover from Margaret Hodge, Frank Field and John McDonnell and the fact that Brooks writes for Private Eye all made it pretty clear what I could expect in its pages.
But I was surprised to discover that the book is somewhat better than I expected. The first section on the history of the profession is reasonably well researched, although there is more about the history of the US profession than the UK but I suppose that's necessary to set the picture for the ascendancy of the global firms.
The opportunity to take a slightly more balanced view of the probity of the profession is occasionally missed: with reference to Robert Maxwell's scathing description by the Board of Trade inspectors as "a person who cannot be relied upon to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company" Brooks does not inform the reader that one of those inspectors was Sir Ronald Leach, senior partner of Peat Marwick Mitchell and that the firm refused to have anything to do with Maxwell thereafter.
Neither is there any discussion of the establishment of UK accounting standards and the sincere attempts by the profession to address the measurement and valuation issues inherent in the reports being audited (which is where Sir David would come in.)
The second section gallops through more recent scandals, pointing out the high rewards and lack of accountability that have privileged accountants over those who have lost money and jobs. Oddly, there is almost no mention of the boards of the client companies discussed: all responsibility is placed at the doors of their auditors with no reference to corporate governance failings.
The final part in which Brooks interviews Big Four partners in an attempt to hold them to account could have been really interesting if approached more objectively - perhaps with the help of disinterested academic support enabling more nuanced probing, giving some deeper insights into the thinking of leading accountants about their role. And the conclusions about what might be done are far from startling.
For me, the real kernel of the questions Brooks should have been asking lies in footnote 12 of chapter 2: "for whom does a company account?" Our reporting framework, in which audit is so central, is based on a set of assumptions about this question which were developed in another era and are inappropriate for current circumstances. If the profession really wants to retain its audit role, it should be leading thinking about this question, in order to shape the place of audit in the future.
