Accountant’s creed

I beg the indulgence of my readers this Sunday as I share here instead an excerpt of my keynote speech last Thursday before the Association of Certified Public Accountants in Commerce and Industry (ACPACI):

There were times, during the last decade or so, that accountants grabbed the limelight for the wrong reasons. Enron, AIG and Lehman Brothers, to name a few, were accounting-assisted scandals. External auditors were quick to be identified for crucifixion, but what can’t be missed is the role of the accountants inside the corporation – those accountants in commerce and industry.

If at all it is a saving grace, accountants are not the most guilty in a fiscal scandal. They are, at best, pawns; and at worst, accomplices.

These exceptions do not define the accounting profession. But they can define a global economy that can be brought to its knees by the ripples of a collapse of a giant financial institution, assisted by accounting mistakes, if not accounting fraud.

I have difficulty defining our profession to the guy next to me because I cannot point to a tangible product. It is easier to say that we tabulate the Oscars or the Miss Universe votes as that is relatable to all, but tabulation does not define us.

I envy engineers or architects because they can show to any person the result of their labor, whether it be the three towers of the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore or the smaller three towers of Rockwell Business Center at Ortigas Avenue. I have a friend claiming that he got involved in designing the bridgeway connecting the two buildings of SM Megamall (a novelty when that was built), but I could not create the same impact explaining that we once performed an audit of the financial statements of SM.

It’s easier for a doctor to point to a source of pride by naming the persons whose lives he saved or whose illnesses he cured. For an accountant, it just doesn’t sound the same to say that you saved costs for a company by doing tax-efficient structures.

It must be said, though, that accountants have gone beyond non-traditional accounting products like environmental accounting, forensics, data analytics and technology-related services. But even these new service offerings cannot define an accountant.

What really defines an accountant is its real commodity, and that commodity is trust.

Think about it. If people don’t trust that the money they part with will be accounted well, they will not deposit their money in banks. Then there will be no banks, no financial institutions, no pooling of funds for economic advancement. Without the financial reports, people will not invest in a company that they do not personally know anyway, and then there would be no public listing, no stock exchanges anywhere in the world.

If you cannot measure growth without a validated base figure of past performance, then how can you aspire for growth? If you cannot figure out employee bonuses without a verified result of operations, then how can you at all reward employees?

We may not build skyscrapers, but we can build a higher level of trust and confidence in the recorded transactions and in financial reports. We may not save lives, but we can elevate the standard of living because through transparency, people will be compensated with what they deserve. We may not be able to invent cure for diseases, but we know governance. And governance can be the cure to many corporate ills.

So the next time we are asked, “What is your profession?” I would suggest an answer: “Our profession is about the preservation of trust.” Our real role is to protect what is true. As accountants, our real job is to be custodians of the truth.

And that should be our source of pride.