The Internet by the Numbers

The Accounting profession seems to have taken over the business world during the past decade. The Big Six accounting firms are now in so many aspects of corporate development one can’t pass a Dilbert cartoon without running into an accountant’s team member, now called management consultant.

We are not here to take the Mickey out of consultants, however -- lord knows there is a need in all the lean organizations for some thinking not driven by fear alone -- but to talk about accounting. That dusty old bookish practice hidden at the heart of every business which first grew the Big Six and their ilk. Which therefore can be seen as the critical antecedent to today's ubiquitous management consultant.

Specifically we look at accounting and the Internet. And what a fine spawning ground the net has proven to be for this fecund profession. There are hundreds of linked sites which cover the accounting trade in great detail, both pragmatic and academic. We list some below. Information found via these links will feed everyone from the CEO and CFO to Legal, Human Resources and Investor Relations officers.

One great lesson in looking at this corner of the Internet comes in seeing how the new leaders of the business scene -- the management consultants born of accountants -- have taken to heart the power of the Internet and worldwide web communications. Their Web sites are current masterworks of info-orchestration, with educational environments for corporate execs and team members, marketing shop windows and linkages which recognize most important constituencies.

For fast access, here are the main "Big Six" Web sites:

Arthur Andersen: www.arthurandersen.com
Coopers and Lybrand: www.colybrand.com
Deloitte Touche: www.dttus.com/home
Ernst and Young: www.eyi.com
KPMG: www.kpmg.com
Price Waterhouse: www.pw.com

Chock full of a variety of information, they of course have not forgotten their roots in accounting. Debates rage in this arcane area, but the information to engage in the discussions is now easily accessible through the sites above and below in this column. A current hot topic, for instance, is how intellectual property is handled.

Intellectual Assets

Long a concern to content providers, entertainment and software creators, this is now being addressed in the accounting profession as intellectual capital. The debate is over how this can actually show up in the company accounts and be properly handled as an asset, with an effect that reaches directly to share price, among other things.

Traditionalists argue this can never happen with such so-called intangible stuff; the modernists say this is what is most valuable to more and more companies each day in the real world, thus it must be dealt with in a measurable way.

To learn more about this and other accounting issues of the moment, follow me.

Practitioners who are electronically aware either through company culture or their own cyber interests may well have probed the Net on this issue, but for those just tiptoeing into the electronic information world, we will shine a bit of light this month on ... Accounting.

Oh, what a boring thing, you moan!! Well, tut-tut. Of course to the uninitiated it is not like the flash and dance of marketing and front-line selling. But it is the grease of the organization, the underpinning without which the entire structure would collapse as those of you in management who deal with regulatory groups, shareholders and or the senior executives who scrutinize budgets know so well.

Thus, we take a look the Internet's support for this central aspect of every corporation. If you or your firm is already Net-savvy, you may well have gone ahead of the rest by now. But if you haven't had the time, the equipment or the inclination, here is a primer on what awaits.

As with all Internet resources, this is a moving target and we may only sample the vast amount of material one can find using the search engines that populate cyberspace. Nevertheless, a bit of time looking here can be transformed into many hours of deep research which in previous times could have taken whole semesters of university time or weeks of travel to equal; indeed, the results possible today for the diligent could not have been achieved before now.

First stop will be at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where the Rutgers Accounting Web (RAW) project has centralized an amazing collection of information and linkages to other accounting sites around the world (http://accounting.rutgers.edu). The section called “Accounting Resources on the Net” includes headings such as Big Six, Associations, Journals, Education, Taxation, Audit & Law, Software, Government and FASB (the US Financial Accounting Standards Board). And these are simply the headings! There are hundreds of listings in these categories on this, itself but a section of the site. You get the idea -- this is a place where one could easily spend hours just looking, let alone taking away solid information pertinent to your work.

Luckily this site and many of those which are linked to it have search engines that will accelerate your research.

Corporate Finance Directors, auditors, comptrollers, legal staff and many others can make similar searches and acquisitions of information on this and the other sites to which the Rutgers site provides pointers. One of these is put up by the Summa Project in the UK, sponsored by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales, or ICAEW
(http://www.icaew.co.uk/menus/links/link.htm).

Unlocking the Treasures

How might these treasure troves actually serve someone in the workplace? It is feasible for an Investor Relations Officer, for instance, to track down a large mass of history and current data on corporate governance. The Summa site has a discrete category on this, and others mentioned here add to the amalgam available. A large compendium of governance data has been put together, for instance, at a site purpose-built for the topic. You can find it, full of news and resource links galore, at www.corpgov.net.

Thus armed, an IRO can enhance -- if he or she has not already done so -- value to the senior management and the board of directors well beyond the investment dialogue with analysts and shareholders. In the US, such information is already required knowledge for the journeyman IR practitioner, activism by large shareholders now becoming a business. Rest assured this will creep into other countries soon. The giant California public pension fund, Calpers, has recently issued a notice to various companies based outside the US of its interest in their corporate governance practices. Observers say lists of companies by name which do not meet Calpers governance ideals may not be far behind. They already name such no-goodniks in the US in annual press releases.

A search through the sites mentioned will produce documents the activists have issued on the subject, reports from academia and elsewhere on the state of governance oversight and examples from corporations who have already invested large amounts of time and money in deciding how governance should be practiced in their organizations.

Where else might we look for information of value to those who care about accounting?

I am partial to the academically or professional group sponsored sites mainly because they attempt to be fair in their broad offerings, and because I would not wish to promote any one commercial enterprise. Nevertheless, you will find when you start looking through the myriad links available that many commercial sites -- especially those which the Big Six, turned consultants-on-everything, have created -- are vast data mines of their own, rich with information and tools for a wide number of corporate functions.

Another academic reservoir, boiling over with data, is run by the Journal of Finance at Ohio State University (www.cob.ohio-state.edu/~fin/journal/jofsites.htm). It provides much from the Business School at the university, but like other Internet “megasites” has grown to encompass masses of related information and links to a surprisingly long list of finance-related sites. Scores of such links are listed in a variety of categories and while they overlap with some you will have found at Rutgers or elsewhere, that is the nature of the Internet -- each contributor marshals its own resources.

Government Resources

After exhausting many hours looking at the sites introduced through the ones so far listed, here’s another to help ensure all bases are covered. This one comes from the Vice President of the United States himself, Al Gore. Mr. Gore has managed to champion a broad range of initiatives in America, with the Internet and its educational potential high on the list. One result is a vast warehouse of information called Financenet, a site which claims to be the biggest finance site in the world (www.financenet.gov). I will leave the research on that claim to others, but it certainly stands the weight test. A stack of the home pages indexed here along with the first page on each document available would get an OK from a CEO I once worked for. When he received a large staff report, he would hold it in his hand, give it a bounce and pronounce whether it was ready for submission based on its heft. Such off-hand (excuse the pun) regard may represent the way many think of the net based on all the tales of lurid uses, chaotic communications and inane babble in the chat rooms. But do not be too hasty in your judgment if you haven’t tried it. After all, the system began as a very serious way to link academics and government in the handling of voluminous critical information. It grew for years as a valuable tool generally hidden from the public, only reaching the grasp of the many when the Worldwide Web was created in the early nineties.

That its many possibilities include twists and turns for which were never intended is not unlike the world of accounting, as many a practitioner and observer can testify from personal experience. Give it a try and see whether it, like accounting, isn’t far more valuable than it initially appears to be.

[First published in: Corporate Online 1997]

© Copyright 1997, 2001 Hally Enterprises, Inc.