Five questions with accounting professor and published short-story writer Brent White
2012-12-03 10:02:26
Brent White is an accounting professor in the Ron Joyce Centre for Business Studies and a published short-story writer.
1- What is your research area?
I am very interested in the history of "value for money auditing." This answers the question 'Is the government doing things with the economy, efficiently and effectively?' Effectiveness looks at the big picture of whether government has done what it should be doing, evaluating whole programs. I am intrigued by the history of how this came about in the 70s. When the Auditor General Act was passed by the Federal parliament in 1977, it gave the auditor a broad set of new powers that they never had before.
One of the key people in getting this act passed was then auditor general James Macdonell, a very powerful and dynamic figure. He made the most important statement in Canadian accounting history, which implied that government programs were in a chaotic state. "I am deeply concerned that Parliament, and indeed the government has lost, or is close to losing, effective control of the public purse." It was this statement that inspired or gave parliament the political will to give him what he wanted. The answer to this problem was "value for money auditing."
This was the original reason it was introduced, but now, over the past forty years, we have auditors looking at so many vast areas. For example, I noticed that provincially an auditor was looking at infection control in hospitals, whether people were washing their hands and if there are hand sanitizers in the proper places. How did we get from looking at government spending to worrying about hand washing? So, the question is 'has parliament now got a pretty good control of how money is spent?' 'Or is it perhaps worse than it was?'
An omnibus bill recently went through parliament that mixed a money bill with public policy. You would have to ask 'is that is improper control of the public purse?' This is a big issue, yet there is not enough questioning of what goes on.
2 - What inspires you to write a story?
Well something just sticks with me. In one case I had this opening line to a story. I would just keep thinking about this line and it turned out to be a start of a story. In another case, I was walking home from work one day and a character just popped into my mind and it was as if I heard her narrating a story, which was loosely based on two separate incidents in two different families. Right now I am writing about a character, an aging pitcher, that I have had in mind for many years.
Talk about your hockey lock out.
Last time the NHL was locked out I was personally very frustrated, so I decided that I was going to lock myself out for a year and not watch hockey. At lunchtime one of my fellow workers said, 'Are you still locked out?' That was the start of an essay I wrote for The Globe and Mail.
4 - How do you make accounting interesting for students?
I explain to them that they are learning a foreign language, the language of business. I also explain that the financial statements tell a history. These ideas come from somewhere and have changed through time. We have had an accounting period from the 1930s to roughly now where we emphasized conservatism; values have to be based on what you actually paid for things. The reason for this was that these people had gone through the Great Depression. Now there is an emphasis on the users of the statements; the user needs to have good information to predict the cash flow of the company. That means we have to estimate certain things rather than use actual costs. Given what has been going on recently, perhaps it would be better to return to the conservative approach.
5 - You worked in the Office of the Auditor General for a number of years, what was the most interesting thing that was uncovered?
Well, the ones I found most interesting were when government would not follow its own laws. It would pass an act or regulation requiring the government to do something and then it would not do it.