The much-maligned cost-plus contract used in the procurement of defence assets has received little attention in the accounting history literature focused on accounting and the military in times of war. An extensive archive of a World War 2 contract between the Australian government and the UK De Havilland Aircraft Company for the supply of Tiger Moth airframes provides an opportunity to investigate important features of this contract, including cost recording and disclosure, monitoring of cost data by government inspectors, resolution of uncontracted events and evidence of government action to mitigate risks associated with this form of contracting. We also broaden the extant literature on open-book accounting on the premise that government access to the contractor's costing system constitutes a strong subset of this phenomenon. Finally, the batch-costing techniques utilised show strong evidence of 'learning' in respect of direct labour costs, consistent with this feature of cost behaviour in aircraft assembly.

The introduction of the Navy Act of 1758 by the British Parliament was designed to provide a mechanism whereby the payment of wages and allowances to Royal Navy seafarers and their dependants would be placed on a more equitable footing through more timely remittances. This study challenges earlier claims made concerning the effectiveness of the Act in this regard. By utilising modern accrual accounting techniques, we demonstrate conclusively how, over a 14-year period of war and peace (1754-1767) that included the promulgation of the Act, seafarers were forced to endure longer periods for payment seemingly at odds with the desires of Parliament. We provide explanations regarding this phenomenon showing seafarers were ensnared in a macro-level public-finance policy agenda that strictly prioritised the credit status of the Royal Navy through the timely payment of Navy bills at the expense of the day-to-day survival needs of seafarers. In order to maintain reputation and ensure the ongoing supply of materials, we show that accounting technologies, in the form of parliamentary budgetary processes and Treasury and Royal Navy cash management practices, were used to deliver this outcome.

Purpose The paper explores the creation in Australia of the Register of Accountants for National Service. Established at the outset of the Second World War, the Register operated for four years from June 1940 providing voluntary, non-remunerated, part-time and after-hours services to a highly stressed and seriously stretched federal government bureaucracy by members of the main Australian professional accounting bodies. Departments of the Navy, Army, Air Force, Supply and Development and Munitions were the largest consumers of the services offered. Design/methodology/approach The study of the Register relies mainly on an extensive archive of war-time documentation from the Federal Government and various accounting professional institutes which has survived, predominantly in the National Archives of Australia. The resource is particularly rich in material covering the complex negotiation processes that brought the Register into operation together with documentation recording and reporting the work of the Register. The themes of professionalization, institutional legitimacy, volunteerism and patriotism are all invoked to explain the presence of the Register in the machinery of government that was assembled to deliver the ultimately successful war effort. Created by the principal professional accounting institutes, the Register attests to the commitment of their members to the war effort and, thereby, the importance of the profession to Australian society. Findings The perilous situation of Australia at a time of war provided a compelling incentive for the accounting profession to organise itself in an efficient and highly effective manner to assist with the war effort. The disparate and somewhat fractured accounting profession at the time was able to work together in a structured, cohesive and disciplined manner to provide voluntary services when called upon. To deliver the voluntary services promised, a purpose-built set of institutional arrangements was put in place. An extensive inventory of the potential services that could be provided by members of the main professional accounting bodies was conducted to facilitate the smooth matching of government needs with services available. Research limitations/implications Discussion focusses only on Australia where the Register was unique. No other examples have been discovered where a profession has self-mobilised to serve a nation in a time of war. A further limitation is that the activities reported are restricted to self-reporting by the Register and a small loose collection of documents prepared by the Department of the Navy. Originality/value The uniqueness of the Register is the core of the originality and value of this study. How and why it came into being and the method by which it completed the “task” assigned to it stand as testament to a profession strategically placed to contribute in a substantive manner to the war effort at minimal cost to the nation.

This article contributes to remedying the paucity of biographical information about Australian luminary accounting figures in the first half of the twentieth-century, a period of enormous change and development in the accounting profession, particularly in relation to its organisational structure, international links, literature, intellectual base, education and role in relation to government in both peace- and war-time. It is argued that no individual luminary is more neglected by biographers, yet deserving of extended biographical treatment, than Sir Edwin Van-der-Vord Nixon, one of the great figures in Australian accounting, whose eponymous firm was a critical antecedent to the present day EY Australia. Nixon’s career spanned the crucially important ‘coming of age’ period in Australian accounting. The key evolutionary developments in Australian accounting that provided the foundation for the modern profession are the backdrop against which Nixon’s lifelong career in accounting can be observed.

Within the accounting history literature, there exists a small sub-realm that focuses on the nexus between accounting and war and accounting and the military. This article is a review of 55 articles published in the new millennium (2000–2017) ranging across a 420-year period, encompassing many wars and periods of peace, and involving multiple countries. Several accounting issues including procedures, costing, budgeting, disclosure, financing, efficiency gender and culpability emerge. The availability of existing accounting knowledge forms the basis of the review, with accounting shown to be adaptive and reactive to the needs of the military (and the state) in peacetime and wartime emergency. Specifically, in applying existing accounting knowledge, accounting contributes to the military or war. Where new accounting knowledge is developed, accounting is influenced either by the needs of the military or the dictates of war.

With antecedents extending to 1886, CPA Australia is one of the world’s most significant professional accounting associations. Reflective of its long history and widespread influence, the organization holds an extensive and diverse archive that evidences both its own development and the general evolution of accounting and business practices. This article presents a case study of a project to digitize selected aspects of this archive. Informed by perspectives on managing archives in the digital era, the benefits and challenges of digitization are presented. A key benefit was enabling access to digital images while preserving rare and fragile original records and documents. However, challenges arose in prioritizing the items for digitization, and this necessitated the development of a model, taking the form of a decision matrix. The CPA Australia case study will be informative for other organizations seeking to use digitization as a means to overcome the dilemma associated with providing access to archival materials while also ensuring their preservation. RESUME CPA Australia , dont les origines remontent a 1886, demeure une des societes professionnelles de comptables les plus importantes au monde. A l’image de sa longue histoire et de son influence tres etendue, l’organisation detient des archives considerables et diverses qui font preuve a la fois de son developpement et de l’evolution generale de la comptabilite et des pratiques d’affaires. Cet article presente une etude de cas d’un projet pour numeriser certains aspects de ces archives. Fonde sur des perspectives sur la gestion des archives a l’ere numerique, on y presente les avantages et les defis de la numerisation. Un avantage cle est de permettre l’acces aux images numeriques tout en preservant des documents d’archives originaux rares et fragiles. Cependant, des defis ont surgi lorsqu’il fut question de determiner quels documents numeriser en priorite, d’ou la necessite de developper un modele qui a pris la forme d’une matrice decisionnelle. L’etude de cas de la CPA Australia interessera d’autres organisations qui cherchent a se servir de la numerisation comme moyen de surmonter le dilemme lie a la question de donner acces au materiel archivistique tout en assurant sa preservation.

Harriett Amies (1907–2006) was the first female Bachelor of Commerce graduate of the University of Melbourne and the first female to qualify for membership of an accounting professional body in Victoria largely on the basis of tertiary qualifications. Her career encompassed teaching and accounting, as well as army service during World War II. In a last altruistic gesture, she donated her body to the Department of Anatomy at the University of Melbourne, coming full circle back to her alma mater. Her life and career spanned almost a century, one in which women went from almost no presence in the public arenas of universities and the professions, to almost equal representation in numbers of students and members. A narrative and interpretive approach to the life and career of Harriett Amies contributes to the literature on gender and accounting history, including the social construction of the accounting professional and women’s economic self-determination.

The application of advanced digitization technologies to accounting and business archives has created new opportunities for accounting and business historians. The joint American Accounting Association and European Accounting Association Task Force (2006–2010) that examined digitization confirmed this. This paper explores these opportunities, along with some attendant challenges and cautions, with reference to the digitization of two significant archives located in Australia. The first is the archive of CPA Australia, a professional accounting association that has its beginnings in 1886 and which today has over 132,000 members. The second is the archive accumulated by the pre-eminent accounting scholar Raymond Chambers during his long and extraordinarily productive tenure at the University of Sydney. Studies of surviving business records, biography and institutional history provide examples of scholarship that is enabled by digitization technology and which has the capacity to inform contemporary issues and debates.

At national level, arguably the most severe budgetary and financial discontinuities occur when states are created or recreated. The challenge then is to create viable financial systems which reduce the danger of state failure. Despite their importance, these processes are under-researched in the accounting and finance literatures. We examine these processes in relation to Iraq, the former Mesopotamia, which emerged as a fledgling state only after World War I, a process, occurring under British suzerainty, and complicated by existing and proposed financial obligations. Iraq's early history provides a case study of the role of financial management in state-creation.

Reforms to the British navy’s estimates for 1888—9 radically changed the way that budgetary information was presented to parliament. Motivated by a desire to facilitate efficiency judgments about public expenditure, in the new-style estimates expenditure was classified according to object or purpose rather than on the basis of the traditional subjective categorizations. These reforms were instituted, in the face of strong Treasury opposition, almost as a fait accompli, by Mr Arthur Forwood (later Sir Arthur Forwood, Bt), Parliamentary and Financial Secretary to the Navy, supported by his senior minister, Lord George Hamilton, First Lord of the Admiralty, both of whom possessed unusually advanced ideas about public-sector efficiency and management. The article examines the background to and nature of the reforms and the unusual dynamics of the reform process, as well as attempting to ascertain their wider place in the history of governmental budgeting and accounting.

The events threatening to engulf Australia as the Japanese imperial forceS continued their push through southeast Asia caused enormous concern for the Department of the Army as civilian and uniformed staff struggled to cope with large increases in manpower and expenditure responsibilities. The department moved, in January 1942, to create an expert panel of accountants to provide advice with a view to overcoming these problems. This paper focuses uniquely on a small group of individuals brought together for their expertise in accounting drawn exclusively from the practitioner ranks of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia. The paper draws attention to the fact that, while several of those invited to serve had “inside” knowledge and experience during World War I (1914–1918), only those holding the designation of chartered accountant were invited to participate, seemingly ignoring the great potential available from the wider profession of the day.

The Lloyd George-appointed Committee on National Expenditure (Geddes Committee), charged with reducing projected 1922—3 Supply Expenditure by £100m comprised outstanding businessmen who employed an extraordinary range of techniques and approaches, some of great antiquity (but nowadays thought to be “modern”), and others genuinely novel, to lay the groundwork for returning British public expenditure to a peace-time footing following a post-Armistice budgetary crisis. Drawing mostly on documents lodged at the UK National Archives, the methodologies and political, institutional and behavioural dynamics of Committee operations are analysed to show how it achieved arguably the most profound analysis of British public expenditure ever undertaken.

This paper takes the contemporary audit expectations gap and seeks to establish its place in the commercial dynamics of late-Victorian England. The gap(s) in this paper relate to the views on audit-practice expectations as differentially articulated by the judiciary and audit practitioners. A paucity of codified guidelines on audit expectations either in statute or by the profession provided the ultimate imperative for consideration of expectations when the nascent profession was struggling to establish its place in the market. Through an extensive review of judicial decisions and the extant professional and academic literature, the paper demonstrates that a significant inconsistency of views existed on the bench and within the profession, causing a disjoint between the bench and the profession. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, it became clear to the profession that it needed to address the lack of guidance on expectations before judicial activism completed the task for them.

This article documents groundwork for initiatives to enhance the international characteristics of the discipline of Accounting as taught within the University of Melbourne.A strong commitment to the notion of international curricula pervades much of the vision of the university, and strengthening the international dimension of the curriculum is identified as one of the means to achieve this end.Accounting is used as the practical context for the project, and the curriculum analysis suggests the discipline lends itself readily to internationalisation with respect to Management Accounting and Information Systems, but Financial Accounting and Audit & Assurance Services are not so straightforward.The study revisits the accounting curriculum at the micro level and challenges the reader to rethink the notion of an international curriculum by drawing on curriculum content and pedagogical processes with a view to producing a curriculum that has a greater international complexion.

A review of the literature in the area of audit fee determinants includes fifty‐six studies drawn from seventeen countries over the period 1980 to 2000. The review starts with work initially based in the US market and then shows that attention spread almost immediately to a number of other markets, some of which were similar in structure to that of the US including the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and Ireland. A second extension of this work has seen studies based on data drawn from markets including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, South Africa, The Netherlands and Norway. The comparative, analytical review highlights the use of a core audit fee determinants model that is used and adapted in a limited way, to reflect market specific circumstances and to address market specific issues. The review indicates some consistency across markets in respect of generic variables identified as core determinants of the level of audit fees. There is little evidence in the literature to indicate historical, cultural, institutional or other market‐specific factors being addressed in a systematic way, particularly in respect of developing countries.