The increase in its net claim on resources is the profit a business makes in any given reporting period. But only if you exclude the claims of its shareholders, who are legally permitted, if not duty bound, to expropriate its profits in perpetuity.
The conceptual underpinnings of GAAP (to use the vernacular) are actually pretty laudable. To simplify greatly, they effectively require companies to tell the financial truth with unflinching exactitude. Since companies are intrinsically averse to telling the truth, especially when it’s unsavoury, which it often is, and since management are loathe to admit culpability for anything that happens on their so-called watch, these concepts have their work cut out for them. Which is why those whose job it is to introject and apply them are doomed to a life of disparagement (at best) or, more likely, moral turpitude.
Technical accountants are often accommodated in windowless, airless, soulless basement offices. This is in fact the environment in which they flourish. Attempts to relocate them into natural light have not, historically, ended well. Technical accountants are chthonic creatures (or neurodiverse to use the word du jour). They do not need nor do they seek human contact. Their professional nourishment comes solely from the work itself (the more abstruse, the less it involves neurotypical humans the better). Status, wealth, political currency, these things are meaningless to the technical accountant.
Auditors elicit fear in some, annoyance in others. In yet others disgust.
The only grad job I could get, and I mean this quite literally, having applied for hundreds of jobs, was a trainee auditor role at a tinpot accounting firm in the City. My god how I hated it. Now? Now, I actually think it was good for me to have been forced to do a job I was congenitally ill-suited to. It meant I had to rewire my brain. To not do so would have entailed failure, something I wasn’t prepared to countenance (inexplicably).
I hear myself and think macho. But I am not macho. Why, then, do I write as if I am?
A writer guy who used to go to the same school as me (was in the same year in fact) said in some interview on YouTube: writing is all about word choice, every word a decision. Since this so-called peer of mine was a supremely gifted student, I naively absorbed this bunkum as gospel. (It took me ten plus years in the writing wilderness to realise the preposterousness of this idea of the writer as decision maker. And then another five before I wrote anything that didn’t want to make me vomit.) So, former fellow student, you couldn’t have been more wrong. Also, for the record, I was intimidated by you at school and for many years thereafter. I probably still would be if I met you in person. From afar, however, I think I am over it. I await your next novel. It’s been a while.
