RESPONSE by Raymond John Chambers

1991 Hall of Fame Inductee
Professor Emeritus of Accounting
University of Sydney, Australia

The Accounting Hall of Fame is unique, for here are joined in one roster practitioners and scholars. It signifies that each group contributes in some substantial way to the advancement of one art. But the modes of contribution are essentially differ-ent. Practice demands great versatility, patience and compre-hension, to match the exigencies of diverse clients with the per-formance of a socially necessary task. Scholars and teachers, on the other hand, serve no immediate clients. Ideally, they are the monitors of practice in general, discriminators between what is generally serviceable and what is merely expedient. The essen-tial difference between practice and inquiry was captured by Francis Bacon, 400 years ago: “lookers on many times see more than gamesters”. More recently, J. B. Priestley expressed the same idea thus: “Nobody in his senses would expect a born seer to do. That much is generally acknowledged. But it is equally ridiculous to suppose that a dashing and triumphant doer can really see.” In that little bit of philosophy lies the reason why practice and inquiry, in most learned professions, proceed in tandem, practitioners and investigators doing their own thing with their special skills, each respecting the domain and the competencies of the other.

In accounting, it is still otherwise. Teachers and researchers on a large scale confuse the generally serviceable with the merely expedient. They have long tried to give the same standing to the habitual and conventional as might properly be given to firm knowledge and principle. The attempt has been in vain. The very terms expedient and conventional betray a difference between mere rules and defensible principles. Confusion of the two has led some academics to hold that “there is no theoretical basis for preferring one set of techniques over another,” and “that we should abandon the chimera that we can ever establish a unified theoretical framework for accounting”. There has even developed a strong strain of disbelief in the possibility of making accounting better than it is, in spite of its logical and practical flaws, flaws that have long been the butt of criticisms of practitioners, academics, governmental officials, and business people alike.

On the other hand, there have been great practitioners who have dreamed of a better accounting than was prevalent in their time — among them George O. May, Leonard Spacek and Henry Benson, to name just three enrolled in the Hall of Fame. Who but Henry, Lord Benson, could, in the British House of Lords, describe “annual accounting prepared under the historical cost convention” as “no better than laudable pus”? Dreaming of ideals is thus not just the special province of academics and researchers. The practicing arm of the profession has striven mightily to ameliorate practice, through countless deliberative committees over decades. Doubtless there is virtue in pooling the wisdom of the practically knowledgeable. And, doubtless, where what is taught in textbooks and universities is an undifferentiated mixture of principles and expedients, the combined wisdom of committees of practitioners has seemed to be more promising than reliance on the work of independent research workers; but that enterprise, too, has failed, in spite of the devoted labor and goodwill of members of committee after committee after committee in this country and elsewhere for decades. Which should not be surprising; for in no other field of knowledge and practice is recourse taken to deliberative committees to resolve fundamental problems.

The fundamental questions are: What is the function of ac-counting? and, How may that function best be served? The gen-eral function of accounting is singular — to get at the truth in financial matters. Only up-to-date truth will secure that persons entrusted with power over property and the work and prospects of others do not exercise that power ignorantly, or in a wanton or self-serving fashion. Getting at the truth thus has a highly respectable social role. It is a powerful disciplinary influence for good in business, government, and society at large. Trust, honesty, and fair dealing between those who trust and those who are entrusted, turn on truthfulness, truthfulness in accounting, in particular. It must therefore be of serious concern that disregard for the truth is endemic in modern accounting. Practitioners and teachers alike tolerate and justify the notion of conservatism — which means telling less than the truth; the cost doctrine — which entails evasion of the up-to-date truth; and creative accounting — which plainly means tinkering massively with, or disregarding utterly, the truth. To eradicate such mischievous notions is demanding of the greatest and most altruis-tic endeavors of the profession — practitioners and academics in double harness.

They are still at cross purposes, however. To quote Henry Benson more extensively: “until we … learn that … annual accounts prepared under the historical cost convention are no better than laudable pus, so long will a large number of our businesses move remorselessly and deservedly to the mortuary”. But at the same time a substantial segment of the academic profession seeks to propagate the notion that conventional accounts are not misleading; and it does so by recourse to the trappings of statistical analysis that not only are incomprehensible to, and therefore beyond appraisal by, practitioners, but also are the object of critical utterances of mathematicians, economists, physicists and philosophers alike. Fruitful collaboration between practitioner and academic is unlikely to flourish where the two sectors of the profession entertain antithetical ideas.

Mutual and deserved respect and goodwill between practi-tioners and researchers in other professions have been at the root of great advances in knowledge and technology. A similarly fruitful partnership in accounting is devoutly to be wished for. But it is not an end attainable as long as practitioners put little trust in independent researchers, researchers concern themselves more with methodological niceties than with the fundamental conditions of serviceable practice, and teachers concern themselves with propagating the conventional wisdom regardless of its follies.

I have long encountered the names, and many of the per-sons, of those honored in the Accounting Hall of Fame, profes-sional leaders of eminence and scholars of great reputation. My engagements through most of my professional life have involved me in the struggles and anxieties of both sectors of the profession. If I have done anything notable, it has been because I have been able to draw on the wisdom and stand on the shoulders of many masters, great in their time and in the vocation of their choice. But, on the other side of the equator and the other side of the Pacific, I thought not that I would be summoned today to join such company.

To The Ohio State University and the Board of Nomina-tions, custodians of the Hall of Fame, to kind advocates un-known to me, I express my deep gratitude for and appreciation of this day’s mark of esteem.

THE ACCOUNTING HALL OF FAME MEMBERSHIP Year Member

1950 George Oliver May*
Robert Hiester Montgomery*
William Andrew Paton*
1951 Arthur Lowes Dickinson*
Henry Rand Hatfield*
1952 Elijah Watt Sells*
Victor Hermann Stempf*
1953 Arthur Edward Andersen*
Thomas Coleman Andrews*
Charles Ezra Sprague*
Joseph Edmund Sterrett*
1954 Carman George Blough*
Samuel John Broad*
Thomas Henry Sanders*
Hiram Thompson Scovill*
1955 Percival Flack Brundage*
1956 Ananias Charles Littleton*
1957 Roy Bernard Kester*
Hermann Clinton Miller*
1958 Harry Anson Finney*
Arthur Bevins Foye*
Donald Putman Perry*
1959 Marquis George Eaton*
1960 Maurice Hubert Stans
1961 Eric Louis Kohler*
1963 Andrew Barr
Lloyd Morey*
1964 Paul Franklin Grady*
Perry Empey Mason*
1965 James Loring Pierce
1968 George Davis Bailey*
John Lansing Carey*
William Welling Werntz*
1974 Robert Martin Trueblood*
1975 Leonard Paul Spacek
1976 John William Queenan
1977 Howard Irwin Ross*
*Deceased
1991 Accounting Hall of Fame Induction 87
1978 Robert Kuhn Mautz
1979 Maurice Moonitz
1980 Marshall Smith Armstrong
1981 Elmer Boyd Staats
1982 Herbert Elmer Miller
1983 Sidney Davidson
1984 Henry Alexander Benson
1985 Oscar Strand Gellein
1986 Robert Newton Anthony
1987 Philip Leroy Defliese
1988 Norton Moore Bedford
1989 Yuji Ijiri
1990 Charles Thomas Horngren
1991 Raymond John Chambers