TPB Note: I trained as a Chartered Accountant in the 1960s. I was articled to Brian Maynard, a Partner at Cooper Brothers & Co in London. UK which was in the process of combining with Lybrand, Ross Bros. and Montgomery from Phildelphia USA. At the time the accounting firms were partnerships with all the responsibility and risk that goes along with operating as a partnership. In the UK, accountancy was a highly respected profession with very high ethical standards.
Some years later one of my contemporaries who had been with me at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and later trained with me at CB&Co, and later again become a senior partner at Cooper and Lybrand observed to me that accountancy was no longer a profession, but it was a business. This is sad ... but also dangerous. That was in 1991. Since then the loss of professionalism in accountancy and in the broader business community has only become worse.

It is my understanding that in the early days of the agricultural revolution and then the industrial revolution, the business community was prone to exaggerating the financial opportunity to potential investors. The misrepresentation was blatant and eventually people in power determined that the lying should be put to an end by having financial statements independently audited. This idea is ongoing, and companies obtaining finance from the public are still required to submit themselves to audit.