Content area
Full text
A Gradual Degeneration of Professional Values
By 1980, a deterioration in professional values appears to have set in. At the Institute's annual meeting in October, outgoing Board Chairman Wm. R. Gregory, a practitioner from Tacoma, Washington, vividly warned members of the increasingly fractious climate in the profession:
It seems that the effects of the phenomenal growth in the profession and competitive pressures have created in some CPAs attitudes that are intensely commercial and nearly devoid of the highprincipled conduct that we have come to expect of a true professional. It is sad that we seem to have become a breed of highly skilled technicians and businessmen, but have subordinated courtesy, mutual respect, self-restraint, and fairness for a quest for firm growth and a preoccupation with the bottom line.1
In 1982, Max Block, a CPA and the former longtime editor of The New York Certified Public Accountant, lamented that "accounting profession" was "a term that has lost some of its relevance" (Block 1982, 165). Among other things, he remarked that "Some of the major firms do not refer to themselves as Certified Public Accountants or Accountants and Auditors," not even on their letterheads (Block 1982, 176). However, this was not news. Six years earlier, only two of the Big Eight firms, all of which wrote letters to the Metcalf subcommittee that were photocopied in The Accounting Establishment (1976), used stationery identifying the sender as accountants or auditors.2 The other firms provided no identification of the sender at all, just the name and address of the firm. Block (1982, 176) added, "This [practice] undoubtedly eliminated the service limitation implicit in such titles."
This professional climate evidently worsened in the following years. In May 1985, the Institute's Special Committee on Standards of Professional Conduct for Certified Public Accountants, headed by George D. Anderson, the Institute's 1980-81 board chairman, all but pressed the panic button in its interim report to Council:
There has been an erosion of self-restraint, conservatism, and adherence to basic professional values at a pace and to an extent that is unprecedented in [the] profession's history.... We believe the profession is on the brink of a crisis of confidence in its ability to serve the public interest. (Special Committee 1985, 3-4)
The Special Committee was appointed...