Efficient accounting systems: justifying US accounting practice in an unregulated commercial environment

Abstract

This paper presents the contextual social discourse in which US accounting practices emerged within an unregulated commercial environment in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. This is shown to be in stark contrast to the emerging British accounting profession, which was influenced significantly by developments of governmental regulation of commerce, through bankruptcy laws and specific requirements for annual audits. In the US, appeals for professional expertise relied mainly on the promotion of the accountant's skill in designing and monitoring efficient accounting systems for the economic and moral well-being of society. The profession developed these practices without the aid of specific legal sanctions. The profession appealed through the marketplace for their skills to be used, because they would provide economic and moral benefits. It is shown that reform elements in US society used these widely accepted practices of the efficient accounting system to reform government, most explicitly and publicly in the reforms of he US Treasury Department by the Dockery Commission in 1895.