75 years of fuzzy accounting

When the head of the University’s accounting discipline, A A (later Sir Alec) Fitzgerald inaugurated the Commonwealth Institute of Accountants (now CPA Australia) – University of Melbourne Annual Research Lecture on 10 October 1940, he probably did not anticipate that the series would evolve into what is now the University’s longest running continuous annual research lecture. It is also believed to be the world’s oldest continuing accounting research lecture series.

Such a future would have been considered unlikely when Fitzgerald delivered his lecture on the ‘field for research in accountancy’. World War 2 was already disrupting many of the University’s public programs. 

Accounting was then a ‘fringe’ discipline within the University. Most accounting education was via evening classes at private coaching colleges and the examinations of professional accounting bodies. Australia-wide, all university accounting academics, including Fitzgerald (principal of a major public-accounting firm), were part-time, with the University of Melbourne pioneering the full-time track in 1946 with the appointments of Louis Goldberg and Jean Kerr to lectureships, both of whom later would give lectures in the series.

The lack of any subsequent wartime gaps in the Accounting Research Lectures did not reflect any neglect of the accounting profession’s national obligations. The first four lecturers – Fitzgerald, Allan Clunies Ross, John Gunn and Leslie Schumer – all rendered important wartime service to the Commonwealth gratis while holding demanding professional and business positions: Fitzgerald as a member of Capital Issues Committee which controlled all private-sector capital raisings; Ross as Director of Scientific Manpower; Gunn (who had served in the AIF in World War 1) on the Taxation Advisory Committee; and Schumer, then General Manager of transport concern Yellow Express Ltd, on the War Transport Committee.

The war impacted on two subsequent lecturers in different ways. The 1951 lecturer, Russell Mathews, one of the first students to complete the four-year Bachelor of Commerce honours degree, required a walking stick to reach the podium due to a shattered knee sustained in action in Bougainville in 1945. His 1960 counterpart, Trevor Johnston, had completed University of Auckland degree subjects under the auspices of the International Red Cross while a POW in Germany after being captured in North Africa in 1942.

When they gave their lectures, both Mathews and Johnston were full-time academics, illustrating the gradual broadening of lecturers’ occupations. The first eight speakers in the series were all in the ‘intellectual practitioner’ mould of Fitzgerald – full-time practitioners and managers who were also leaders of the accounting profession. The expansion of university studies in accounting meant that the pool of potential lecturers was augmented by an increasing number of scholars able to provide fresh research-based insights.

Until the early 1970s financial reporting coasted along on the basis of few general principles, fuzzy in their application. Subsequently the increasing complexity of business and the desire of capital markets for greater precision and consistency in financial reporting have driven a need for accounting standards.

Topics lectured on encompass financial accounting, financial management, capital markets, taxation, auditing, managerial accounting, information systems and social accounting, with some topics, such as Fitzgerald’s inaugural lecture combining several of these fields. Understandably, one area not included in Fitzgerald’s survey was information systems (IS) with future vigneron, Brian Stonier, introducing this topic to the series in 1962 with his examination of ‘the influence of electronic data processing upon accounting, accounting thought and practice’.

On issues of the day, it is striking that in the Faculty’s Insights journal which acts as a record of important public programs, the most downloaded article is Naomi Soderstrom’s ‘Sustainability reporting’ based on her 2012 research lecture.

The forthcoming 75th anniversary lecturer, Sir David Tweedie, demonstrates many of these facets of the lecturers and lectures. A University of Edinburgh Commerce and PhD graduate, he has been variously an academic, technical director of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland, national (UK) technical partner of accounting firm KPMG, chair of the Accounting Standards Board (1990–2000) and chair of the International Accounting Standards Board (2001–2011). His topic, ‘Changing the image of the profession: the fight for economic reality in accounting and the increasing value of the audit’ will continue the series’ tradition of eminent figures in accounting and cognate disciplines examining important challenges of the day to practitioners, regulators and educators.

Sir David Tweedie’s lecture is today, Monday 13 October at 6pm, in the Spot – Copland Theatre Faculty of Business & Economics, 198 Berkeley Street, the University of Melbourne. 

www.fbe.unimelb.edu.au

www.events.unimelb.edu.au/all/free-public-lecture