Responsibility for Poor Accounting: Are Accountants Always To Blame? Accounting is the process of “analyzing, recording and summarizing” financial information into useful and reliable financial statements that would serve as an overview of the business’ financial performance to both internal and external users. Accountants are the people who deal with this as a career, that is, to professionally maintain a business’ accounts up-to-date. It’s easier to put the process into words than to execute it. And that’s the reason why it takes a long time for an accountant to acquire the needed experience and to achieve a level of trust and professionalism in the eyes of the business’ management. However, instances of poor accounting may take place. And in most cases, such instances result in monetary losses for a business. Monetary losses and poor accounting are often blamed upon accountants (alongside managers or solely) but based on detailed observation several reasons prove the contrary and are mainly related to the internal management. …show more content…
Managers are usually in charge of taking all the needed and right decisions for a business. Some of the managers’ tasks include choosing the right financial accounting method, risk assessment, and monitoring activities. One of the cases that show how management controls are important and how bad it affects the business when it’s wrong is the Toshiba scandal that came up in 2015 where the management decisions were never questioned by the employees (accountants included) and this resulted in an overstatement in the company’s earnings for seven years. Another less known incident mentioned in a news article by the Washington Examiner was a theft case in the US Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia where poor security controls led an employee (now a former employee) to steal $160K over a period of four years (2010 to 2014) and eventually get away with it (Joel Gehrke,