Returning to our recent reflections on the portrayal of accountants in movies and television…

You may recall that Toby York, founder of The Accounting Café, had posted the following on LinkedIn:

• There’s angst about the state of the #accounting profession.
  
  Firms struggle to recruit, and convincing people of accounting’s purpose and social value is becoming harder. It’s possibly no accident that the profession lacks traction in popular culture. Or maybe its absence in popular culture is the cause.
   
  Lawyers have Suits. Advertising has Mad Men. Vets have, mmm, All Creatures Great and Small? Medics have too many to count, but let’s say Grey’s Anatomy.
   
  This is not just a casual observation. Drama captivates us because it shows social impact and the power dynamics at play. Could accounting, a field too significant to be left solely to accountants, also be a compelling drama if given a chance?

A partial answer to the question arises from the ongoing third season of Industry, a show set around Pierpoint & Co., a London investment bank. The show isn’t about accountants or accountancy, but does occasionally dramatize the discipline in exactly those terms: impact and power dynamics. The opening stretch of the current season (I’m writing this after the fourth episode) focuses in large part on the bumpy initial public offering of Lumi, a green energy tech company; the following dialogue is from the first episode, delivered direct to Lumi’s CEO by one of its investors (as per a transcript available online):

• We’ve got some last-minute concerns about your valuation… based on the very sneakily timed earnings report with its surprising net debt figure.
• The debt profile of the company has seemingly shrunk overnight, just as you’re about to go public?
• …In your cash and cash equivalents, you’ve added in receivables which, uh, you know won’t get settled.
• You’ve calculated your indebtedness as a net debt to EBITDA ratio, and it looks like you just massaged the EBITDA to make that ratio decrease.
• …This earnings report, your first as a public company, will legally have to be published on your website for anyone to see, and you’re putting lipstick on the pig at the last minute.
• Which got me thinking what else you’re keeping from people.
• So I had my analysts up all night modeling what would happen if, say, given your debt profile, natural gas prices spike. My conclusion is that you’d be sailing into a storm on a shit boat.
• Therefore, we disagree with Pierpoint’s price of 4.30 pence a share. It should be closer to four pounds.

Taken at face value (and the CEO doesn’t dispute any of the specific allegations, instead suggesting that they “drill down to the crux” and make a quick deal), this goes beyond putting lipstick on a pig: including receivables within cash and cash equivalents, for instance, would be a clear reporting violation, and the intimation that those receivables aren’t collectible even as receivables would only raise the violation into the stratosphere. Of course, as the conventions of episodic television require, this and other lines condense what would presumably be intricately prolonged conversations into seconds of screen time (the show is highly adept at this, in the manner of Succession before it). But if the object is to identify juicy, profession-enhancing portrayals of accounting talk, then that would surely be one: an exchange in which the ability to engage with financial information provides a strategic edge which (in this particular scene) can then be rapidly cashed out.

No less interesting is the current season’s broader focus on ESG-investing, and the recurring suggestion that it’s a “fad” which leads certain industry practitioners away from sound practice. As one character puts it in the third episode:

• All of the companies parading around here are only really interested in their bottom-line exposure as the world heats up.
• It’s people really just convincing themselves that what’s good for their bottom line is also good for the human condition.
• I’m not saying BlackRock doesn’t wanna effect change when it uses its proxy votes to push whatever political agenda it has.
• But in the cold light of day, I’d wager its investors don’t give a fսck about activism.
• Or they’re deluded enough to think it’s going to earn them an actual return.
• I mean, I’m not a climate denier.
• I found that whole crowd rather Neanderthal.
• But if Venice ends up on the seabed in 2075, who cares?
• It’s a shithole in summer.
• And I don’t intend to be around to see it sink.

That same character sums up the main narrative of that episode as a story of “two women who flew into a climate conference and left with a sin stock fund.” As I noted, the current season is still in progress, so it’s too early to tell whether the cause of ESG will emerge with any kind of dignity and credibility. But if nothing else (and to cite another prominent aspect of the show) it’ll almost certainly be sexier than in the drab real world…

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.