Reviewed by Rowan Jones University of Birmingham
This book is a reproduction of 31 articles on British local government accounting published during the period of its title.
It is offered as a comparison to an earlier collection in this series, by the same editors, called Local Authority Accounting Methods: The Early Debate 1884-1908 (1991).
The idea of these books is an excellent one. The material is important in understanding accounting and regardless of what one might wish to be the case, these kinds of papers would not otherwise be accessed by most accounting researchers.
Moreover, for this book the editors have chosen papers that largely deal with issues in which accounting in business organizations confronted accounting in municipal corporations. One consequence is that some of the discussion will have more immediate resonance for researchers who have a conventional accounting background. The most obvious example, perhaps, is an extract from and elaboration on, the 1878 decision by the Inland Revenue to allow depreciation against tax on profits [p. 37]; but there are many others.
In local government accounting’s own terms, there is a par-ticular relevance to this second book. The period with greatest historical significance (judged in the context of British local government’s history from the Middle Ages to the early 1980s) was the first decade of the twentieth century. What this book provides, then, is a re-capitulation of the more generally-ac-cepted arguments from the earlier controversies, especially in the light of changes in the law and practice that had taken place subsequently.
The main topics covered by the papers are: publication of accounts, pricing of municipal trading services, costing for electricity and tramways, overhead allocation, income tax and capital accounting. The authors were, for the most part, profes-sional accountants employed in local government, although councillors also contribute and there is some official material.
This book is to be unreservedly recommended to account-ing historians. However, it must be said that it is a pity that the short introduction should have spoilt the overall effect of the book. This includes an unsuccessful attempt to rationalize the editors’ choice of articles from The Accountant to the exclusion of articles from the Financial Circular on the basis that the latter was acting as a censor! Accounting historians do not yet have the luxury of objecting to the reproduction of articles on the ground that a better balance would have been provided by choosing other journals. When such a balanced judgment is re-quired, it will come from cogently-argued theses, which may then lead to selections based on a thesis. The point is that there were interesting articles in the Financial Circular during this period, as there were in other accounting journals, which are worth reading. But as disappointing as the editors’ rationalization is, it cannot detract from the valuable contribution that the reproduced articles will make to accounting history.
