Accounting at the London School of Economics

Given the aims of the founders of the London School of Economics, it is not surprising that accounting should have been taught at the School from soon after its establishment. An early focus on teaching practical accounting, with professional practitioners as teachers, was gradually supplanted by approaches informed by the economics of decision-making in conditions of scarce resources. By the 1930s, the Department of Business Administration provided an intellectual basis for thinking about financial reporting and costing that challenged taken-for-granted practices. After World War II, the “LSE Triumvirate” of William Baxter, Harold Edey and David Solomons took forward ideas of opportunity cost and value to the owner as core theoretical concepts, while developing undergraduate and later postgraduate programmes that provided rigorous education for future accountants, administrators, business people and academics. However, the focus on education, and the weak infrastructure for accounting research in the UK had the unintended consequence that, by the early 1970s, the Department of Accounting did not have the opportunity of responding to changes in research focus in North America, which were influenced by developments in financial economics

Audit failure, litigation, and insurance in early twentieth century Britain

The relationships between audit failure, judicial fault-finding and the availability of professional indemnity insurance have been debated by legal and accounting writers in both academic and professional circles. This paper adds an historical perspective to the current literature by presenting a review of cases involving allegations of auditors' negligence over a fifty year period starting with the first significant case involving the question of auditors' duties. Amateur auditors who failed to carry out a proper audit could expect little sympathy in the professional press but when large law suits were brought against recognised accountants, the profession was forced to consider the risks of the consequences of adverse judicial decisions. It was not long before practitioners sought to manage those risks through professional indemnity insurance. However, we find no evidence that the availability of insurance increased auditors' risk by opening the floodgates of litigation