accounting

accounting,

classification, analysis, and interpretation of the financial, or bookkeepingbookkeeping,
maintenance of systematic and convenient records of money transactions in order to show the condition of a business enterprise. The essential purpose of bookkeeping is to reveal the amounts and sources of the losses and profits for any given period.
..... Click the link for more information. , records of an enterprise. The professional who supplies such services is known as an accountant. Auditingauditing,
examination and statement of accounts and of other documents connected with accounts by persons who have had no part in their preparation. Systems of financial inspection have long been used, especially in connection with public accounts.
..... Click the link for more information. is an important branch of accounting.

The Role of the Accountant

The accountant evaluates records drawn up by the bookkeeper and shows the results of this investigation as losses and gains, leakages, economies, or changes in value, so as to reveal the progress or failures of the business and also its future limitations and possibilities. Accountants must also be able to draw up a set of financial records and prescribe the system of accounts that will most easily give the desired information; they must be capable of arriving at a comprehensive view of the economic and the legal aspects of a business, envisaging the effect of every sort of transaction on the profit-and-loss statement; and they must recognize and classify all other factors that enter into the determination of the true condition of the business (e.g., statistics or memoranda relating to production; properties and financial records representing investments, expenditures, receipts, fiscal changes, and present standing). Cost accounting shows the actual cost, over a certain period of time, of particular services rendered or of articles produced; by this system unprofitable ventures, services, departments, and methods may be discovered.

Development of Modern Accounting

Although there were stewards, auditors, and bookkeepers in ancient times, the professional accountant is a 19th-century development. Unlike those precursors, modern accountants usually do not service a single client or employer; instead they offer their expertise, for a fee, to several individuals and businesses. The profession was first recognized in Great Britain in 1854, when the Society of Accountants in Edinburgh was given a royal charter. Similar societies were later established in Glasgow, Aberdeen, and London. In the United States the first such professional society was the American Association of Public Accountants, chartered by the state of New York in 1887.

All the states and Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia now have laws under which an accountant who fulfills certain educational and experience requirements and passes an examination may be granted the title Certified Public Accountant (CPA). CPAs have organized into state and national societies. The bodies representing the accounting profession in the United States are the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, which is the contemporary successor organization of the American Association of Public Accountants, and the American Accounting Association, organized in 1916. In the United States, the Financial Accounting Standards Board, an independent nongovernmental organizaiton sponsored by financial-reporting industry groups, is the main institution responsible for establishing accounting standards and rules. The International Accounting Standards Board develops standards and rules that are accepted by many nations.

With the growth of corporate activity in the 20th cent., the field of accounting has increased greatly in importance and has seen many improvements in theory and techniques. The chief causes of changes in accounting methods have been more complex tax laws and regulations and the need to keep uniform accounts for possible governmental or public scrutiny. Contemporary accounting firms also have taken on managerial functions and are no longer concerned simply with ascertaining and reporting financial condition but also with advising a client how to act on this information; they also consult on information-technology systems and other services. This has greatly increased the potential for conflicts of interest, because the services provided to clients by accounting firms must be evaluated in their audits and because the fees paid by a client for such services may be more important to the accounting firm than that paid for an audit, potentially undermining the independence of the audit. As a result, in 2000 the Securities and Exchange Commission specified the types of services accounting firms could provide without compromising their independence as auditors.

A series of revelations concerning accounting firms' failure to detect or publicly challenge irregularities or fraud when auditing the finances of a number of corporations led Congress to establish (2002) the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. The board is appointed by the Securities and Exchange Commission and has the power to register and regulate accountants and firms that act as auditors. It sets standards for audits and is responsible for reviewing audits and disciplining accountants and accounting firms.

Bibliography

See N. A. H. Stacey, English Accountancy, 1800–1954 (1954); M. Backer, ed., Modern Accounting Theory (1966); L. Goldberg and V. R. Hill, The Elements of Accounting (3d ed. 1966); J. D. Edwards, History of Public Accounting in the United States (1960); A. J. Briloff, Unaccountable Accounting (1972); M. Chatfield, A History of Accounting Thought (1977).

Accounting

a type of economic calculation; a function of economic administration. Socialist accounting is characterized by a unity of methodology and general principles of organization, the possibility of calculating data on the scale of both individual economic branches and the national economy, the comparability of account indexes with plan indexes, completeness, precision and reliability, timeliness, clarity, and economy. Socialist accounting serves as a means of control over the fulfillment of plans and over the security of socialist property, and it promotes the introduction and strengthening of economic accountability and the uncovering and utilization of internal resources.

In the USSR, unified basic principles have been worked out and are in use for accounting and reporting; a unified plan of accounts has been created; and a unified system of national-economic accounting that presents the reliable, objective information necessary both for the management of individual industrial enterprises and for the national economy has been introduced and is operating successfully. The subject matter of accounting is capital, including the sources of the capital and the economic activity, aimed at the fulfillment of plans, of enterprises, organizations, and institutions and branches of the national economy. The method of accounting is the body of techniques used to devise the indexes necessary for managing socialist enterprises: an accounting balance, documentation and inventory, evaluation and calculation, accounts and double-entry bookkeeping, and reporting. All these elements of accounting are used not on an isolated basis but as parts of a whole.

Documentation is the basis for building a system of accounting, a method of reflecting in documents the objectives of accounting. For each economic operation or homogeneous group of operations a document is drawn up—a carrier of information, an official form, intended to be a written record of economic and other operations and acts. The unified direction of accounting predetermines the creation of unified forms of documents; in addition, the size of the documents is standardized. Documents are used for preliminary and subsequent control over the security of socialist property and the legality and expediency of economic operations, for impressing managers with their responsibility for the legality and expediency of operations, for preventing violations and uncovering abuses, for analyzing economic activity, and for giving legal evidence of completed operations. Diagrams of circulation provide a route for every document and a time limit for processing it in the departments of an enterprise, organization, or institution. With the automation of accounting, other carriers of information are also used. Not all occurrences can be reflected in documents, and inaccuracies, errors, and abuses are possible in accounting. Therefore, documentation is supplemented with inventorying (computation in physical units of economic assets and the sources of their formation). Full inventorying encompasses all assets and their sources. Partial inventorying affects one type of economic asset or its sources. Documentation and inventorying are used to gather primary data on accounting objectives.

Documented economic operations and inventories are reflected in accounts. Accounts are special two-sided tables intended for the grouping and current accounting of economic assets, in both their sources and their economic processes, and for revealing indexes that are necessary in the management of an industrial enterprise. The left side of the table is the asset side; the right, the liability side. All accounts are broken into basic, regulating, operational, and outside-balance accounts. Basic accounts are intended for the accounting and control of the condition and movement of economic assets and the sources of their formation. They are divided into asset accounts and liability accounts. Asset accounts take in economic assets: on the debit side, arrivals (increase); on the credit side, their removal (decrease). Asset accounts have a net debit, which shows the remainder of a certain type of economic assets. Liability accounts take in the sources of the formation of assets. On the credit side of liability accounts an increase is reflected, whereas on the debit side a decrease in these sources is reflected. Liability accounts have a net credit.

Regulating accounts correct the amount or evaluation of the economic assets and the sources of their formation that are entered in basic accounts, and they also provide an exhaustive description of the subjects of accounting.

Operational accounts are used for the accounting and control of economic processes and for revealing their results.

Outside-balance accounts (zabalansorye scheta) are used for the accounting, under the simple system of bookkeeping, of the economic assets that are being used temporarily by an enterprise.

A distinction is drawn between synthetic and analytic accounts. In synthetic accounts, accounting is conducted on a generalized basis by economically homogeneous groups. Analytic accounts are intended to give in detail the contents of synthetic accounts by individual types of assets, sources, and processes. Each economically homogeneous group of analytic accounts is combined with a definite synthetic account. Current accounting in synthetic accounts is called synthetic accounting, and in analytic accounts, analytic accounting. Each economic operation is reflected in equal amounts on the debit side of one account and on the credit side of another. This is called the double-entry method. When economic operations are reflected in accounts, a connection arises between them—an account on the asset side is linked to an account on the liability side. Such a link is called a correspondence of accounts, and the accounts are called corresponding accounts.

Economic assets are heterogeneous in their sources and economic processes. To get generalized summary data, they are evaluated in cost terms. The major method of evaluation is actual prime cost.

In addition to actual prime cost, planned prime cost and wholesale prices are used to evaluate working capital. In so doing, the difference between the projected evaluation and the actual prime cost is calculated separately in order to get data about the actual prime cost. The accounting of fixed assets is done using their original or replacement cost. Managing an enterprise (or organization) on principles of economic accountability presupposes the determination of the total expenditures of the enterprise for the production of output in order to control these expenditures and to determine the profit rate of industrial production. This is done with the aid of costing. Evaluation and costing are used to express the objects of accounting in a generalized monetary measure.

Verification of plan fulfillment for the past period requires adding up the results of the work of an industrial enterprise by basic indexes (volume of sales, output, its prime cost, profit rate, and so on) with the aid of accounting reports, one of the main forms of which is the accounting balance.

Methodological guidance in accounting is carried out by the Ministry of Finance of the USSR, which in coordination with the Central Statistical Administration of the USSR approves standard plans of accounts, standard forms of accounting and reporting, and instructions for their use. The basic normative decrees regulating the organization and methodology of accounting include the resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR entitled On Measures to Eliminate Serious Shortcomings in the Organization of Accounting and to Strengthen Its Role in Exercising Control in the National Economy (November 1964); the Statute on Documents of and Entries in the Accounting of Enterprises and Economic Organizations (October 1961); the Statute on Chief (Senior) Accountants of State, Cooperative (Except Kolkhoz), and Public Enterprises, Organizations, and Institutions (November 1964); and the Statute on Accounting Reports and Balances of State, Cooperative (Except Kolkhoz), and Public Enterprises and Organizations (July 1967). The most important directive on accounting of production is Basic Statutes on the Planning, Accounting and Calculation of the Prime Cost of Output at Industrial Enterprises (1970). A system of bookkeeping accounts has been established under the standardized plan of bookkeeping accounts approved by the Ministry of Finance in coordination with the Central Statistical Administration. The plan of accounts indicates the names and numbers of the primary synthetic accounts and the names of the subaccounts, as well as the types of activity in which these accounts are used. All accounts are divided into economically homogeneous groups. The instructions for the plan of accounts give a detailed description of the accounts and a standard outline of their relationship.

Accounting is done in the accounting department of an enterprise, which, as a rule, is an autonomous structural subdivision. It is headed by the chief (senior) accountant, who is administratively subordinate to the head of the enterprise and, in questions of accounting and drawing up reports, to the chief accountant of the higher organization. Instructions from the chief (senior) accountant on questions of accounting must be followed by all employees of the enterprise.

Various forms are used in accounting—the journal, the noncash journal, and the punch-card, for example. The use of one form or another depends on such factors as the size of the enterprise, the level of mechanization, and the degree of centralization of accounting. The principal ways of further developing accounting are mechanization and automation, centralization, improvement of methodological principles, and simplification and lowering of costs. Accounting in various branches of the national economy (for example, construction, trade, and agriculture) has its specific features, which are determined by the nature of the economic activity of the enterprises and organizations and their form of socialist ownership (state ownership or cooperative-kolkhoz ownership).

REFERENCES

Makarov, Z. G. Teoriia bukhgalterskogo ucheta. Moscow, 1966.
Bezrukikh, P. S. Organizatsiia bukhgalterskogo ucheta na predpriiatii. Moscow, 1966.
Margulis, A. Sh. Bukhgalterskii uchet v otrasliakh narodnogo khoziaistva. Moscow, 1966.
Mukhin, A. F. Bukhgalterskii uchet v promyshlennosti SShA Moscow, 1965.

A. D. KARBYSHEV

Accounting

Related to Accounting: bookkeeping, Financial accounting, Accounting Concepts, Accounting Principles

Accounting

A system of recording or settling accounts in financial transactions; the methods of determining income and expenses for tax and other financial purposes. Also, one of the remedies available for enforcing a right or redressing a wrong asserted in a lawsuit.

Various accounting methods may be employed. The accrual method shows expenses incurred and income earned for a given period of time whether or not such expenses and income have been actually paid or received by that time. The cash method records income and expenses only when monies have actually been received or paid out. The completed contract method reports gains or losses on certain long-term contracts. Gross income and expenses are recognized under this method in the tax year the contract is completed. The installment method of accounting is a way regulated utilities calculate depreciation for Income Tax purposes.

The cost method of accounting records the value of assets at their actual cost, and the fair value method uses the present market value for the recorded value of assets. Price level accounting is a modern method of valuing assets in a financial statement by showing their current value in comparison to the gross national product.

Where a court orders an accounting, the party against whom judgment is entered must file a complete statement with the court that accounts for his or her administration of the affairs at issue in the case. An accounting is proper for showing how an executor has managed the estate of a deceased person or for disclosing how a partner has been handling partnership business.

An accounting was one of the ancient remedies available in courts of Equity. The regular officers of the Chancery, who represented the king in hearing disputes that could not be taken to courts of law, were able to serve as auditors and work through complex accounts when necessary. The chancery had the power to discover hidden assets in the hands of the defendant. Later, courts of law began to recognize and enforce regular contract claims, as actions in Assumpsit, and the courts of equity were justified in compelling an accounting only when the courts at law could not give relief. A plaintiff could ask for an accounting in equity when the complexity of the accounts in the case made it too difficult for a jury to resolve or when a trustee or other fiduciary was charged with violating a position of trust.

In the early twenty-first century, courts in the United States generally have jurisdiction both at law and in equity. They have the power to order an accounting when necessary to determine the relative rights of the parties. An accounting may be appropriate whenever the defendant has violated an obligation to protect the plaintiff's interests. For example, an accounting may be ordered to settle disputes when a partnership is breaking up, when an heir believes that the executor of an estate has sold off assets for less than their fair market value, or when shareholders claim that directors of a corporation have appropriated for themselves a business opportunity that should have profited the corporation.

An accounting may also be an appropriate remedy against someone who has committed a wrong against the plaintiff and should not be allowed to profit from it. For example, a bank teller who embezzles money and makes "a killing" by investing it in mutual funds may be ordered to account for all the money taken and the earnings made from it. A businessperson who palms off a product as that of a more popular manufacturer might have to account for the entire profit made from it. A defendant who plagiarizes another author's book can be ordered to give an account and pay over all the profits to the owner of the copyrighted material. An accounting forces the wrongdoer to trace all transactions that flowed from the legal injury, because the plaintiff is in no position to identify the profits.

Arthur Andersen and Other Accounting Failures

The accounting profession, which is largely self-regulated, has suffered through a series of fiascoes since the late 1990s, resulting in a call for major changes in accounting standards. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has served since 1973 as one of the organizations responsible for establishing standards of financial accounting and reporting. Although the FASB is a private organization, its standards are recognized as authoritative by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, debacles involving major accounting firms required the FASB and the SEC, as well as other regulatory organizations, to consider new rules designed to improve financial reporting. Between 1996 and 2002, investors lost an estimated $200 billion in earnings restatements and stock meltdowns following failures in auditing processes. A number of high-profile auditing failures decreased confidence in the accounting profession. Among these failures were incidents involving such companies as Bausch and Lomb, Rite Aid, Cendant, Sunbeam, Waste Management, Superior Bank, and Dollar General.

One of the most highly publicized accounting failures in this period involved Houston-based Enron Corporation and its accountant, Arthur Andersen, L.L.P. Enron suffered a collapse in the third quarter of 2001 that resulted in the largest Bankruptcy in U.S. history and numerous lawsuits alleging violations of federal Securities laws. Thousands of Enron employees lost 401(k) retirement plans that held company stock. The controversy extended to Arthur Andersen, which was accused of overlooking significant sums of money that had not been represented on Enron's books. Arthur Andersen was later found guilty on federal charges that it obstructed justice by destroying thousands of Enron documents. Enron reported annual revenues of about $101 billion between 1985 and 2000. On December 18, 2000, Enron's stock sold for $84.87 per share. Stock prices fell throughout 2001, however, and on October 16, 2001, the company reported losses of $638 million in the third quarter alone. During the next six weeks, company stock continued to fall, and by December 2, 2001, Enron stock dropped to below $1 per share after the largest single day trading volume for any stock listed on either the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ.

Initial allegations focused upon the role of Arthur Andersen. The company was one of the "Big Five" accounting firms in the United States, and it had served as Enron's auditor for sixteen years. Arthur Andersen also served as a consultant to Enron, thus raising serious questions regarding conflicts of interests between the two companies. According to court documents, Enron and Arthur Andersen had improperly categorized hundreds of millions of dollars as increases in shareholder equity, thereby misrepresenting the true value of the corporation. Arthur Andersen also did not follow generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) when it considered Enron's dealings with related partnerships. These dealings, in part, allowed Enron to conceal some of its losses.

Arthur Andersen was also accused of destroying thousands of Enron documents that included not only physical documents but also computer files and E-Mail files. After investigation by the u.s. justice department, the firm was indicted on Obstruction of Justice charges in March 2002. After a six-week trial, Arthur Andersen was found guilty on June 16, 2002. The company was placed on Probation for five years and was required to pay a $500,000 fine. Some analysts also questioned whether the company could survive after this series of incidents.

The accounting issues in the Enron case extended beyond Enron and Arthur Andersen. Prior to this case and since 1977, the accounting field was supervised considerably by the Public Oversight Board (POB). When SEC chairman Harvey L. Pitt in 2002 made a series of inquiries about the system of self-regulation in the accounting profession, he did not consult the POB. The POB voted to disband, effective May 1, 2002. After the Enron case, the FASB emerged in the public spotlight as the leader of the system of self-regulation and has taken a significant role in the reform of accounting rules. In January 2003, the FASB announced new accounting rules designed to force U.S. companies to move billions of dollars from off-balance-sheet entities into the companies' balance sheets. The SEC has also stepped up its oversight of company accounting.

Cross-references

Accrual Basis; Cash Basis; Income Tax.

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accounting

accounting,

The Role of the Accountant

Development of Modern Accounting

Bibliography

Accounting

REFERENCES

Accounting

Accounting

Arthur Andersen and Other Accounting Failures

Further readings

Cross-references

accounting

Accounting

accounting

accounting

Synonyms for accounting

noun accountancy

Synonyms

Synonyms for accounting

noun a convincing explanation that reveals basic causes

Related Words

noun a system that provides quantitative information about finances

Related Words

noun the occupation of maintaining and auditing records and preparing financial reports for a business

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noun a bookkeeper's chronological list of related debits and credits of a business

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noun a statement of recent transactions and the resulting balance

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