In our conversation on Accounting Professionalism, there are repeated references to ethics, to trust, to the morality of accounting, etc. Accounting is seen as not only a financial system, but a system based on trust and subject to oversight. A system needed to provide assurance to investors and taxpayers, to bring order to financial records, to give government to ability to review business activity, etc.

While accounting began as a tool for merchants to account for investment and the daily activity of their businesses, the system of accounting we have today can be traced back to Luca Pacioli’s first written accounting book, his Summa de Arithmetica. Who was Pacioli and do you think that his influences and beliefs affected how we view and use accounting today? If the author of that first accounting book had a different background (e.g., an attorney, a merchant, a Prince, a banker), would modern accounting be different from what we have today?