My friend Walter Ross recently submitted a comment on my public interest-themed posts and I’m going to post it here to make sure it’s appropriately visible (to the extent that being on this blog is a form of visibility):

• ..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 imagine an independent public accounting profession as the vanguard of change? Come on Walter. Be realistic. Demand the Impossible. .

Wow! Well, as he said at the outset, the goal is to kick-start a conversation, so let’s see. I’ll just make a couple of comments to that end:

The focus of my posts was really on what the concept of the “public interest” means today, in the world as we find it and within current reporting requirements (which, as previously laid out, I take to require a certain degree of conscious opposition to Trumpian forces). Walter’s thoughts are implicitly based I think on an assumption that we eventually come through the current chaos and short-termism and attain a more daringly rational collective perspective, within which such bold leaps might be possible. That may be so, but it seems to me like an awfully fraught journey from here to there, with much for accountants to consider along the way. So how does that affect our sense of the “public interest” – is it mainly a long-term, relatively unchanging reference point (like our abstract concepts of “honesty” and “kindness”), or is it more dynamic than that, such that an accountant’s sense of behaving in the public interest might sometimes change (or even entirely reverse itself)…?

The opinions expressed were almost all those of Walter Ross, with just a smattering of the usual author’s.