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PwC Setting the stage for the future of accounting and accountability ... April 2022 Original article: Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess | ||
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Setting the stage for the future of accounting and accountability
I trained as a Chartered Accountant with Cooper Brothers & Co. in London in the early 1960s. By the time I qualified the firm was doing all its international work via the merged firm of Coopers and Lybrand ... and years later merged again with Price Waterhouse. I was at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge with Peter Allan and subsequently trained with him at CB&Co in London. He subsequently became the Managing Partner in London. He was very much aware that the accountancy profession had morphed into a business. I migrated to the USA in 1966 and applied my training in engineering, economics and accountancy to corporate management and became a very young CFO. Later I worked as an independent consultant internationally cooperating with organizations like the World Bank (and IFC), agencies of the United Nations and others. Accountancy has been an effective management tool for business and investors for a very long time ... like several hundred years ... but in the past 40 years is now less fit for purpose than at any time in history. What bothers me is that the accountancy profession seems to have failed to use the foundational architecture of double entry accounting in a rigorous way to address the management of social and environmental performance as they do with economic (money) performance. I was excited to read the 2021 PwC Purpose Report but came away hugely disappointed ... for many reasons. One of these is simply that it seems to be mostly 'self serving' about how good we are, with little or nothing about the good we do. I got interested in accounting because it was a foundational management tool that could do a lot of good (back then profit improvement) to help the client. I want to see a new era in accounting where the purpose of accounting and the profession is to help all the actors in our global socio-enviro-economic system deliver the most of good social impact, and good environment while earning a decent return on investment. I also have to admit to being quite uncomfortable about the links with GRI and the SDGs, both of which are poorly integrated with with core foundational management accounting as I have embraced it since early in my career almost 60 years ago. Maybe there is material in the public domain from PwC that sets out how the firm addresses coherent comprehensive business accountability for what was once referred to as the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) ... something I refer to as an organization's impact on all the segments of the socio-enviro-economic system. There is such a gap between the rigor of money accounting and the fuzziness of things like trust, transparency and purpose. Maybe you can point me to some PwC material that addresses the goal of making modern accountancy more fit for purpose. Peter Burgess Thank you for your interest in PwC We have received your information. Should you need to refer back to this submission in the future, please use reference number PWC79962972757. Other material Original article: PwC-FY21-Purpose-Report-Executive-Summary.pdf Original article: PwC-FY21-Purpose-Report-Full-Report.pdf
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