English

Accounting Horizons

Vol. 17, No. 4

December 2003

pp. 267-286

How the U.S. Accounting Profession Got

Where It Is Today: Part II

Stephen A. Zeff

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

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