“Count Down” – Now It’s A Matter of Proof

A stack of 240 freshly typeset pages sits on my desk. This week is fully committed to red-pencil proof-reading, for Emerald Publishing’s intended early-November release of “Count Down: The Past, Present and Uncertain Future of the Big Four Accounting Firms”.

The task provides something to prove, in a second sense -- the first being the book itself: my take on the fundamentally threatened state of the current Big Audit model, and the broad scope of the re-engineering required to evolve a sustainable structure for privately-delivered assurance on the financial information issued by the world’s large companies.

There is resonance in reaching this final stage of a book on Big Audit. The first modern independent auditor’s report – William Welch Deloitte's on the half-yearly accounts of the Great Western Railway as of December 31, 1849 – stated, in its entirety, “Audited and approved” (my emphasis). 

From the Latin, probare, to test or to probe – the root for the English, both nouns and verbs.

Across a full range of human endeavor – proofing and proving extend from the editor’s desk to the geometrician’s theorems to the scientist’s hypotheses to the chef’s puddings. Not to offer a guaranty, or a zero-defects promise, but to test or evaluate or assess, in the quest to advance the quality of information, communication and knowledge. 

So it has been for modern auditors, over the span of 165 years -- sampling and testing and evaluating.

In none of these contexts is the process so hubristic as to presume or conclude perfection – a state of grace beyond the performance limits of auditors and proofreaders and the others alike.

Best efforts devoted, flaws will still lurk undetected in these 80,000 words. And I will not be pleased when, post-publication, they pop out into the open. But it will not be for lack of trying.

“Count Down” is now available for pre-publication ordering, direct from the Emerald Bookstore or through Amazon -- as I would be most pleased to have readers here prove for themselves.

 

 

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