The vanished grandeur of accounting

This is a really neat article, and I look forward to reading the book. The field of accounting really is a marvelous and, in current times, under-appreciated bedrock of civilization. In the course of certain matters, I have had the opportunity to work with forensic accountants, which is a field I did not know even existed. Basically, when $100 million disappears from a ledger, forensic accountants dive in and figure out what happened. It is incredible the kind of narrative, capturing a panoply of human behavior, that can emerge from digging through some spreadsheets and associated e-mail chains.

To analogize, imagine spelunking through git commits on a 10 MLOC project trying to figure out: "is someone trying to insert a backdoor? is someone just incompetent? is this just the predictable result of a death march?"

Accounting has always struck me as a field that is un-appreciated by the masses, but valued quite highly by those somewhat more in the know. For instance, a background in accounting is highly valued in investment banking.

My wife is an accounting professor and teaches Theory of Accounting at the graduate level. That's where things get really interesting, because they tackle all the assumptions underlying our accounting systems. How do you account for fixed goods, costs in different sorts of manufacturing and sales models, various forms of compensation, ownership, subsidiaries, taxes, and how do you reconcile reporting requirements for each country, region, and municipality in which you do business, which all may have different rules, along with reporting rules for taxes, which are generally different still, and with your own internal reporting and analysis needs? Do you specify rules down to the letter (and allow tons of loopholes) or do you try to enforce the spirit of the regulations (and leave lots of wiggle room)? How does all this fit in with other legal requirements? How do you match it up to your business processes and IT systems? etc etc

There are tons of really interesting questions, problems, tradeoffs, and philosophy underlying the various accounting systems used throughout the world, and I'm always interested to hear the various topics she's working up lessons for at any given time. So this book sounds very fascinating along the same lines.