"Proper Trust of Liberty": economical reform, the English constitution and the protections of accounting during the American War of Independence, The

Accounting History,  Feb 2008  by Funnell, Warwick

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The purposes of this article are to determine why a close association was believed to exist in England at the time of the American War of Independence between a rigorous, parliamentary-controlled accounting for executive spending on the civil list, in contra-distinction to military spending, and the preservation of liberties fundamental to the English Constitution and how this association provided the impetus for extensive reforms of executive accountability. Hence, the concerns of the article are the motives that precipitated reforms to executive financial accountability in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, most importantly the prompt accounting for civil list expenditures. Requiring the executive to account for civil list expenditure, like that of military spending, was foremost and overwhelmingly a means of strengthening the constitutional supremacy of parliament over the executive (for a history of the civil list see British Parliamentary Papers [BPP], 1868-9 (366), XXXV, part II, p.585ff). The concerns of this article were in part prompted by the recent study by Edwards et al. (2002), which sought to trace the appearance of double entry bookkeeping in English Government departments in the early nineteenth century. The present article also seeks to locate a point of emergence, that of constitutional audit or auditing which is primarily undertaken to give parliament the assurance that money appropriated to the executive is spent for the purposes as approved by parliament and that no more is spent than is approved. Although the technologies of executive accountability which resulted from the reforms of the late eighteenth century provided information to assist with financial management of the nation's finances, this was always a supplementary benefit. Constitutional apprehensions were the primary, immediate and enduring motivations for accounting and audit reform.

Despite the rising economic and social significance of government from the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century with the onset of the first industrial revolution and the historical resilience of the essentials of modern Westminster financial accountability, which had their origins at this time, the history of modern Westminster government accounting and accountability continues to attract relatively few accounting historians The vigorous endeavours of accounting historians engaged in debates over private sector cost and management accounting practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Johnson & Kaplan, 1987; Fleischman & Parker, 1990,1991; Hoskin & Macve, 2000; Fleischman & Macve, 2002) have yet to transfer to the public sector during the same period, for which there are vast stores of rich evidentiary material available in the archives Recent work by Edwards et al. (2002) possibly suggests that this neglect may be waning. The present article seeks to reinforce this momentum.