Long before document-shredding became headline news, accountants found themselves under pressure to change.
Over the past two decades, innovations in computer technology rendered many of the old-fashioned auditor's functions obsolete, prodding accountants to find other ways to bring in revenue.
Companies' desire to produce ever-rosier results for an ever-larger and savvier shareholding public compelled accountants to find ways to put the best possible spin on clients' financial reports.
And then there was simple greed. The industry had already shown it was susceptible. In the early 1970s, a prominent accountant was linked to the Watergate scandal. The next decade, the savings-and-loan crisis raised questions about how accountants could have let things get so bad.
In recent years, partners' pay, largely determined by hourly billing rates, fell way behind that of accountants' investment-banking brethren, enriched by the rise of the stock-market culture of the '80s and '90s. Hiring consultants and having people sell their services to audit clients was a way to narrow the gap.
And ultimately the ancient profession sacrificed the public confidence that underpinned its reputation.
The industry was formed as a vessel of trust, originating more than 10,000 years ago with stone counters in Jericho. In ancient Sumerian cities of the land that is now Iraq, bookkeepers documented wealth by pressing the ends of sticks into damp clay tablets that hardened into permanent records.
Formal accounting was invented by a Franciscan friar named Luca Pacioli in 1494 in his paper "Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita" ("Everything About Arithmetic, Geometry and Proportion").
The treatise described double-entry bookkeeping -- that for every credit entered into a ledger there must be a debit, a concept created by Florentine merchants and hailed by Goethe as "one of the most beautiful discoveries of the human spirit."
Three traits shared by successful merchants, Mr. Pacioli wrote, were access to cash, a constantly updated accounting system and a good bookkeeper. His contemporary Christopher Columbus apparently knew that: On his voyage to the New World, he took a royal accountant to track his "swindle sheet when he started to figure the cost of gold and spices he would accumulate," according to Alistair Cooke's 1973 book "America."
The craft changed little until the industrial revolution, when accounting advanced from pure recordkeeping to a means of survival. Josiah Wedgwood, Charles Darwin's grandfather, kept his British pottery factory alive during the depression of 1772 through the innovation of cost accounting -- calculating the costs of materials and labor for each step of the manufacturing process, and then setting prices to ensure enough margin to remain viable.
By the mid-19th century, "accompants," as accountants were known, were flourishing in Britain. The Cooper brothers, whose name lives on in PriceWaterhouse Coopers, ran a Dickensian operation of screeching supervisors lording over clerks toiling long hours for scant pay. The industry followed European investments to the New World, and in 1887, 31 accountants formed the predecessor to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. A decade later, they created a standardized test, bestowing on a man named Frank Broaker the honor of becoming the first CPA.
In the early 1930s, after the financial scandals of the '20s and the corporate failures of the Great Depression, the industry sought to formalize consistency, transparency and trust in the profession. Already, in 1922, AICPA had banned its members from advertising, saying it wasn't dignified. The group also forbade accountants to poach each other's clients.
The profession got its own governing board and a manual called Generally Accepted Accounting Practices -- GAAP for short. The profession also won the responsibility for auditing public companies, though not without an intense congressional debate.
Accountants had become moral guardians -- an image reinforced in the public's imagination in the 1930s, when Price Waterhouse was enlisted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to count ballots for the Academy Awards.
In lieu of the hard sell, accountants networked at the country club and sat on the boards of nonprofit organizations and chambers of commerce.
In the 1970s, the federal government, amid questions about some companies' accounting procedures, set up the Financial Accounting Standards Board to oversee accountants. But it soon also removed a lot of the restrictions that had prevented big firms from competing with each other.
In the late 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission, concerned about anticompetitive practices, began pushing AICPA to allow accountants to advertise. By 1990, the group had lifted most restrictions on ads.
As the 1980s dawned, globalization and deregulation brought new challenges. To raise huge amounts of money, companies turned increasingly away from traditional bank loans and toward more-complex, and often riskier, forms of financing. Executive pay became tied to performance, so clients had a personal stake in making sure their auditors squeezed out the best results they could.
And now, in the year 2002, AA has been criminally charged with their document shredding activities. It is anyone’s guess what is going to happen next.
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