VERSION|0.5.1|SUBJECT|Rev Dr Dr Prof David Wilkinson, Principal of St John's College Durham  |CONTENT|[b]Rating[/b] 4 out of 5 (Highly platitudinous)

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"It's like looking into the mind of the Invisible Magic Friend," said the award winning accountant Ayma Payne. This was shortly after the accountancy firm, Terribly Terribly Boring and Tedious, produced the reconstructed first balance sheet of the Coca-Cola company. Hidden in that balance sheet are the seeds of the vast multinational company that we know today.

Yet despite all that we have discovered, a note of humility is in order. As an accountant myself, I am embarrassed to admit that we still don't know what 95% of Coca-Cola executives actually do. But this is all just part of the fascination. Every set of accounts answers some questions but opens up new ones.

Bedby Nine, the great Romanian accountant and one of my personal heroes, was one of the most prolific accountants of all time. His talents were such that, given the gross market capitalisation of a company, he could work out their annualised tax exemption in his head. Although oddly not a believer in the Invisible Magic Friend, he loved to explore the unlikely effectiveness of arithmetic as applied to accountancy. He liked to discover the hidden secrets of double entry bookkeeping created by the Invisible Magic Friend.

There are those, who when they realise that accountancy cannot account for the undervalued risk associated with mutualised debt obligations, like to point and say, "Aha, accountancy doesn't know everything, therefore the Invisible Magic Friend exists!" This Invisible-Magic-Friend-of-the-gaps argument is a foolish argument. Only a fool would believe such a foolish argument. No, it is when I see how mathematics makes accountancy possible, the elegance of complex tax avoidance schemes, the Intelligent Design of the annual capital depreciation deduction rules, it is this that convinces me that the Invisible Magic Friend [i]must[/i] exist. What else could possibly explain why accountancy is so finely tuned to making human commerce possible?

[url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p016xlcl]Listen/Read[/url]|CATEGORIES|39,50|IP-ADDRESS|94.168.119.214|CREATEDBY|admin|DATE|1364287953
