Robert H. Parker

Regulating British Corporate Financial Reporting in the Late Nineteenth Century

The regulation of the accounts and audit of British railways, public utilities and financial institutions in the second half of the nineteenth century has been regarded as a minor exception to the norm of a general lack of regulation of corporate financial reporting during this period. This paper establishes that these companies in fact constituted in value terms the major part of the corporate private sector. The paper argues that the reason for regulation was not primarily to protect investors but in order to control monopoly, privilege and safety. Regulatory requirements varied according to the class or size of company; sometimes applied to accounting records as well as financial statements; involved publication in many different ways; imposed uniformity for some businesses but not others; and covered measurement as well as disclosure. Auditing issues made the subject of regulation included: to whom should auditors report; who should appoint them; who could be an auditor?

Naming and branding: accountants and accountancy bodies in the British Empire and Commonwealth, 1853-2003

The number of professional accountancy bodies and accountants within the countries of the British Empire and Commonwealth has greatly expanded within the last 150 years. Each body has had to choose a name for itself. This paper attempts to explain these names and the designations of the members. The names and designations are argued to be exclusionary and inclusionary devices that in many cases have been appropriated from other countries, notably the UK and the US. Certain designations, notably “chartered accountant” and “CPA”, have evolved as brand names. It is argued that access to and use of these brands has spread not with colonisation but with the decolonisation of, first, the settler colonies and then the non-settler colonies. The paper discusses the choice between “chartered” and “CPA” and why neither has become the brand of international accountancy firms operating within a global economy.

Accountants and Empire: the case of co-membership of Australian and British accountancy bodies, 1885 to 1914

This study examines one aspect of the influence of the British Empire connection on the establishment of an accountancy profession in Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It does so by analysing data collected on the comembership of the numerous Australian and British accountancy bodies formed before 1914. It casts doubt on the conclusions of Johnson and Caygill (1971) regarding the predominance of accountants with British qualifications in the creation and growth of the Australian bodies and also elucidates the connection between the professionalization strategies of particular bodies and the membership choices of accountants in the context of imperialism.

The transfer of accounting technology to the southern hemisphere: the case of William Butler Yaldwyn

During the nineteenth century accounting techniques, institutions and concepts were transferred from the UK to the southern hemisphere as British people and capital colonized the relatively empty lands of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. This paper examines the writings of William Butler Yaldwyn (1842–1921), author of the earliest work on accounting published in New Zealand, six works published in Australia and two in South Africa.

The Influence of U.S. GAAP on the Harmony of Accounting Measurement Policies of Large Companies in the U.K. and Australia

U.S. GAAP has increasingly become an influence on accounting practices in other countries, even aside from those traditionally considered under direct U.S. influence. The change arises from the large number of U.S. accounting standards, non‐U.S. companies listing on U.S. stock exchanges, and the amount of U.S. direct investment abroad. As the impact of U.S. GAAP varies across countries, it may affect international accounting harmony. This idea is tested by examining the level of international harmony for eleven accounting measurement policies in matched pairs of large companies from Australia and the U.K., two countries with historically strong cultural and economic links. It is argued that, in recent decades, accounting practice in Australia, more so than in the U.K., has become increasingly U.S.‐oriented. The concepts of harmony of Tay and Parker (1990) and Archer et al. (1996) are employed. International harmony is measured by the between‐country C index and chi‐square test; national harmony by van der Tas’s (1988) H index. While considerable national harmony is found in the U.K. for seven and in Australia for five accounting policies, there is considerable or complete international harmony for only three policies. Evidence is presented of the influence of U.S. GAAP as one factor explaining the poor degree of U.K./Australia international harmony. Australian companies appear to follow U.S. GAAP to a greater extent than do U.K. companies. The state of partial harmony thus existing restricts international comparability of accounting reports and may cause problems for regulators.

The life and career of John Spence Ogilvy (1805-71), the first chartered accountant to emigrate to Australia

So far as the available evidence allows, this paper examines the life and career of John Spence Ogilvy, foundation member of the Society of Accountants in Edinburgh in 1854, who emigrated to Melbourne in 1856, but did not play a part in the development of an organized accounting profession in Australia. The paper also attempts to explain the gap of thirty-two years between the formation of the first accounting bodies in Edinburgh and Melbourne.

Accountancy and empire. The British legacy of professional organization

As an academic with strong interests in both international accounting and accounting history; a former expatriate English chartered accountant who has worked in Nigeria (before independence), Australia and Scotland; and a keen reader of the previous writings of editors Chris Poullaos and Suki Sian, I have been looking forward to the publication of this book. It has been worth the wait. The editors have recruited an expert and well-informed team of contributors. The book is topped and tailed by chapters written jointly by the editors. In between there are chapters by Poullaos on the self-governing dominions ofAustralia, Canada and SouthAfrica in the 1920s;Alan Richardson on Canada ‘between empires’; Chibuike Uche on Nigeria; Devi Susela on Malaysia; Prem Yapa on Sri Lanka; Owolabi Bakre on Jamaica; Marcia Annisette on Trinidad and Tobago; Shraddha Verma on India; and Sian on Kenya. There is also a Preface by Barbara Bush, a historian of postcolonialism. It would have been useful to have had chapters also on Ireland and New Zealand; perhaps contributors could not be found. The main research methods used are interviews and the examination of professional and governmental archives. There is little unexplained jargon. The authors have obviously read their Foucault and their Weber, but the latter is never mentioned despite much use of his concepts of closure and exclusion, and the former is mentioned only in the Preface. The book is mainly about the successor states to the now almost vanished ‘formal’British Empire of sovereign control, but the editors and some of the contributors show themselves well aware that that empire lives on ‘informally’ (control by other means), and that there have been and remain other empires, both formal and informal. Not by chance, I think, those most aware of this, and of Gallagher and Robinson’s seminal paper ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’ (Economic History Review 1953), are Richardson andAnnisette, both currently resident in Canada. Richardson shows his freedom from both US and British influence by his healthy scepticism of the US belief that it is a ‘reluctant sheriff’, and by his own idiosyncratic belief (p. 64) that the British refer to the American War of Independence as the American Revolution and that the British Corn laws were adopted rather than repealed in 1846. The case studies in this book demonstrate the considerable diversity of the post-independence organisation of accountancy in both the former settler colonies and the former non-settler colonies, but they also provide opportunities to generalise. One such generalisation, admittedly incomplete and over-simple, can be formulated as follows. Most agents of formal empire, whether they think of themselves as settlers or expatriates, sincerely believe in the superiority of the ideas, techniques and institutions that they, as an imperial elite, export to the countries that they dominate. The local elite often accepts the superiority of these ideas, techniques and institutions, objecting only to their monopolisation by a foreign elite whom they wish to replace by themselves. Foreign elite accountants do little to help to create a local elite. The composition of the local elites may be determined or at least strongly influenced by factors such as race, gender, language and religion. To achieve their aim the local elites often have to fight against or collaborate with (or both) not

Whole blood screening of antibodies using label-free nanoparticle biophotonic array platform

A gold nanoparticle, localised plasmon array biosensor using light scattering has been employed in the detection of allergen-specific antibodies in whole blood and sera. The array sensor was functionalized with four different allergens, cat dander (Fel d1), dust mite (Der p1), peanut allergen (Ara h1) and dog dander (Can f1) and immuno-kinetic assay was performed to detect their respective anti-allergen IgG antibodies. Specific positive responses to antibodies at a concentration of 25 nM were observed for Fel d1, Der p1, and Ara h1 allergens, while the Can f1 channel served as a reference control. The sensitivity was further enhanced using a secondary anti-IgG detection antibodies to give a limit of detection of 2 nM. The results indicate the potential for nanoparticle scattering multiplexed arrays to screen unprepared blood samples at point-of-care for assays of complex samples such as the whole blood.

Roger North: gentleman, accountant and lexicographer

Roger Norths The Gentleman Accomptant (1714) stands out in the early English language accounting literature for a number of reasons. It applies double entry to landed estates, recommends a system in which the separate activities of an estate are treated in effect as divisions, with inter-divisional transfers, and includes an accounting dictionary. This paper analyses the contents of the book, sets it and its author in their respective contexts, and discusses the possible influences on Norths text.

Henry Rand Hatfield (1866-1945): the triumphs and travails of an academic accounting pioneer:

Henry Rand Hatfield, the subject of an excellent recent biography by Steven Zeff, was one of the pioneers of US academic accounting. Remembered today mainly for his magnificent prose and his forthright and witty defence of accounting as an academic discipline, Hatfield deserves also to be remembered as an internationalist, as the author of one of the first papers on comparative international accounting, and as a contributor to the accounting history literature. He was less successful as an accounting theorist and standard-setter. Academic accountants today can still benefit from his writings on the temporal and global scope of accounting.