The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [58]
I chat with Emily Wan. She is twenty-eight years old and a recent transfer to London from the firm’s Shanghai office, where she found a place after graduating with exceptional grades from Jiao Tong university. She compares the audit process to a piece of carpentry. Capitalism could not function without her, she smiles. The procedures used for audits are identical the world over, enabling accountants to work seamlessly with foreign colleagues, as pilots might. The rules have been codified into a four-thousand-page bible, the Global Audit Methodology, which I take to reading in bed. In Birmingham, every team member has been charged with substantiating a different aspect of the client company’s balance sheet: one investigates its register of fixed assets, another its debt, a third its liabilities, a fourth its creditors and a fifth its provisions. At the close of the process, the senior partner will sign off on six hundred forms which legally underwrite the accuracy of the stated accounts – thereby enabling potential investors to have sufficient trust to let their money sail off on lengthy and intangible digital journeys in the company’s direction.
At present, the team is devising ways to check the reliability of the VAT billing system. They are charting the flow of a hundred million pounds through the client’s internal plumbing in the previous six months. Due to a missing file, there has been an irritating delay in the completion of a Non-Audit Services Annual Independence Continuance Form for Annuity Engagements.
Though the distinction between what is ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’ often dissolves on close examination, we are undeniably far from the human condition as it first manifested itself in Africa’s Rift Valley 250,000 years ago. It is hard not to admire the dedication directed towards the small print. Levels of commitment that in previous societies were devoted to military adventures and religious intoxication have been channelled into numerical needlework. History may dwell on stories of heroism and drama, but there are ultimately few of us out on the high seas, and many of us in the harbour, counting the ropes and untangling the anchor chains.
It is apparent that accountancy lends its practitioners a particular way of looking at the world. The accountants ask me not how or why one writes a book, but whether tax on a title is payable across a few years or must wholly be paid at the moment of publication. They are like renal surgeons for whom one is first and foremost always a kidney.
More impressively, they seem to have no desire to undertake the kind of work which makes any claim to leave a lasting legacy. They have the inner freedom to exercise their intelligence in the way that taxi drivers will practise their navigational skills: they will go wherever their clients direct them to. They may be asked to deal with the financing of an oil rig one week, the tax liability of a supermarket or fibre-optic cable plant the next – without being detained by pressing internal projects and the pathologies and suffering these entail. They have no ambition to become known to strangers or to record their insights for an unimpressed and ephemeral future. They are well adjusted enough to have made their peace with oblivion. They have accepted with grace the paucity of opportunities for immortality in audit.
4.
In a ground-floor conference room, twenty-five new recruits are in their second week of a three-year-long accountancy training course. Last week they were given an overview of the principles of financial reporting, and this week they will be walked through the mechanics of company assurance systems. In an attempt to keep up their spirits, the firm has also bused them to an elegant hotel outside London to meet the chairman and to a spa for an afternoon of treatments and massages. They have in addition been introduced