the.com/accountant
the quiet force who turns chaos into spreadsheets and saves empires from their own arithmetic
means a professional who keeps, examines, and reports on financial records, making sure the numbers add up and the taxes get paid
from From 'account,' which travels back through Old French 'aconter' (to reckon, to count up) to Latin 'computare' — 'com-' (together) plus 'putare' (to reckon, originally to prune or settle). The '-ant' ending marks the doer, as in 'attendant' or 'servant.' So an accountant is, quite literally, 'one who reckons up' — and the older noun 'accomptant,' with its silent 'p,' lingered in formal English for centuries before the leaner spelling won out.
- origin
- Italian merchants invented double-entry bookkeeping in the 1400s
- capone
- Al Capone fell to tax charges, not murder
- luca pacioli
- a monk friend of da Vinci codified accounting
- busy season
- tax deadlines turn April into legal warfare
- audit
- forensic accountants crack frauds the FBI can't
arthur andersen — accounting firm that audited enron before its 2001 collapse, then dissolved in 2002
bernie madoff — investment advisor convicted in 2009 of running a $65 billion ponzi scheme
tax day filing — april 15 deadline in the us when millions hire accountants to file returns