I recently mused here on the often-cited concept of the “public interest”…
I say “recently” because it wasn’t even two weeks ago, but the post already almost seems like a missive from a simpler and more naïve age, given Trump’s rampaging destructiveness since then. The following is from a Globe and Mail column by Adrienne Clarkson, a former Governor General of Canada:
- So, what are we to do as Canadians in our professions and our personal lives? The most important factor is that we are all Canadians and we have to behave like Canadians. We all have to brush up on our history and realize that we live in one of the oldest continuous democracies…
- What we have to do is to continue to believe in the project that is Canada, and which has despite so many difficulties and challenges remained the Canada that we know: bilingual, based on the Magna Carta, and parliamentary democracy…
- We are going to be constantly challenged and threatened. We must continue doing things for others. We must continue to be a welcoming nation. We must continue our path of reconciliation with Indigenous people. We must continue these things because we know that’s the right thing to do. We must continue to do them because it makes us more human to do them. Canadians can only try to mitigate whatever evils there are in the world, even if they come from our closest neighbour with whom we share an unguarded border.
- We must always remember the words of the great reformer Joseph Howe who, in 1835, posed the most important Canadian questions: “What is right? What is just? What is for the public good?”
Which leads us right back to the subject of my previous column: what is for the public good, or as accountants more commonly express it, for the public interest, in an age of Trump? Clarkson writes as if it’s largely self-evident what is right and just and so forth, but experience tells us that well-meaning people differ even on the simplest applications of those concepts (crazy as it may seem to me and perhaps to you, we have to accept that some well-meaning people, even some well-meaning Canadian people, considered voting for Trump “the right thing to do.”) It seems to me that the public interest will not be served in the absence of a more determined approach to define that interest, a specifically Canadian version of it, and to set out parameters for acting in concert with that. To that end, if only as a thought exercise, I’d suggest the following at least might be relevant to the accounting profession’s serving of the public interest in current times:
- Canadian accountants should decline any engagement that would ultimately be hostile to Canada’s interests. Right there, of course, hundreds more questions arise. But as a starting point, no services should be provided to entities that actively work (or of which the primary stakeholders actively work) for pro-Trumpian, anti-Canadian purposes. This would include any Muskian enterprise for instance (and I must immediately acknowledge there that none of this is easy…)
- Leading directly on from that, Canadian accountants should be willing to temporarily suspend their normal targets for per-partner revenue and the like, where those targets necessarily depend on acting contrary to the public interest, and should resist positioning aspects of the current turmoil as profit opportunities.
- Canadian accountants should push harder than ever for strong and consequential sustainability disclosures and practices, including campaigning for Canadian regulators to end their unconscionable dithering and delaying.
- Canadian accountants should focus on proportionality and rationality, not only in matters of public policy but also in their own work, acknowledging for instance that many of the minor disclosure and compliance issues that bedevil preparers and auditors are a likely suboptimal use of resources much more urgently needed elsewhere…
That’s just a few. But I could of course be wrong about the whole thing. Maybe if, to the best of our ability, we project the likely evolution of future American militarism and economic supremacy and climate change-fueled aggressiveness and all the rest of it, and depending how we compute the needs of the many (including those not yet born) over those of the fewer, we’d conclude that accountants could best serve the Canadian public interest by working toward becoming the 51st US state (if only, as Lyndon Johnson put it, because it’s better to be inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in). If we really do a good job at it and help enhance Canada’s negotiating power, maybe we can become 5 or 6 US states! Not the outcome I would advocate for myself, but at least we’d know what we were aiming for. Do we now?
The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.
John Hughes IFRS Blog 
John, your recent columns on the “public interest” – a malleable concept as you note – have got me thinking about and reflecting on our accounting profession. I would be interested in the views of your small but influential group of followers on the role of our profession. So let me see if I can kick-start a conversation.
My career in the accounting profession now feels like ancient history. Indeed, in our present and chaotic times the notion of anything resembling “generally accepted” (as in accounting principles) seems rather quaint. However, while a believer in good client service, I always thought of myself as independent of my clients and engaged in an activity that provided a public benefit. I understood these attitudes to be the ethos of the accounting profession, embedded in the way we did things rather than codified in a rule book.
Thirty five years ago in 1990, before widespread use of the Internet and today’s world of big data, Ursula Franklin titled her Massey Lectures The Real World of Technology. She described “bottom-up technologies that will incorporate opportunities for reciprocity and include indicators of the ongoing set of problems, related, for instance, to physical, environmental, or institutional health”.
She goes on. “The field of accountancy and bookkeeping is in urgent need of redemptive technologies. In order to make socially responsible decisions, a community requires three sets of books. One is the customary dollars-and-cents book, but with a clear and discernable column for money saved. The second book relates to people and social impacts. It catalogues the human and community gains and losses as faithfully as the ongoing financial gains and losses documented in the first book. In the third book environmental accounting is recorded. This is the place to give detailed accounts of the gains and losses in the health and viability of nature, as well as of the built environment”.
Franklin does not comment on the role of the accounting profession.
What might a 21st century independent profession with a robust public interest mandate look like, one that would take up Franklin’s challenge. Here goes:
First we report on all entities that are generators of the material goods and services we need. We would report to (and be paid by) the responsible entity – the shareholders of public or private corporations, the members of a cooperative or mutual enterprise, the government of a government sponsored business. Basically Franklin’s “money” accounts, the Pacioli set of books.
Second we report broadly to our community – a community report – on social impacts, measuring the consequences of the economic activity, the implications for workers, the distribution of wealth generated, the health implications for users of goods and services produced, etc.
Finally we report to future generations – an environmental report centred on the sustainability of our economic activities to protect the long term health and viability of the natural world.
Some bits and pieces of the social and environmental have crept into our Pacioli books and reports under the guise of “stakeholder” pressures and reporting frameworks such as the Global Reporting Initiative. But they are inadequate for the challenges we face.
Measurement and reporting frameworks for the social and environmental reports (to be paid for by governments on behalf of communities and future generations) would evolve over time as the quality and “general acceptance” of the information became imbedded in the way we do things.
Could we imaging an indépendant public accounting profession as the vanguard of change? Come on Walter. Be realistic. Demand the Impossible. .
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