From accounting to accountability: Certified confusion

An endeavour to juxtapose differential tea grower experiences of this year's significant decline in earnings was sabotaged by a disgraceful mistake that has left my farming colleagues, the tea growers of Kaptumo, unimpressed.

Although the growers of Gitugi were disenchanted with payments of Sh53, instead of a higher figure earned the previous year, their protest was at least as lively and intense as that of my compatriots, who, I erroneously stated, could only manage Sh27.

Now it might be convenient to pitch my share of blame in the direction of malfunctioning spyware, but as matters stand in fact, it pleased the uniquely inspired and clever people managing our factories that we of Kaptumo should make do with only KSh17. The magnitude of sheer ineptitude and turpitude it must take to perpetrate such calamitous plunder has to be both utterly confounding and absolutely intolerable.

In the face of legitimate demands for answers, factory management had opted to respond to grower angst by way of vacuous, pedestrian, defensive cynical and disrespectful regurgitations of corporate fluff, anchored on an ancient but no less devastating tactic.

On innumerable occasions, disaffected members have been silenced at general meetings through the sleight-of-hand, which responds to demands for accountability for unsatisfactory performance, by reiterating the auditor's certificate of proper book-keeping. The trick is so subtle and diabolical that in broad daylight, managers demobilise suspicious and outraged members without responding to their legitimate concerns.

Evading accountability

Advocates will be painfully familiar with the bitter sting inflicted by the cruel deployment of this deception. Impelled by vexatious circumstantial suppositions and well-founded misgivings in relation to the stewardship of corporate funds, lawyers will fill up vast spaces, throbbing with predacious impulses, ready to pounce at the portion of the agenda relating to the financial statements.

The intention would be to assault financial statements as nothing more than transparent sanitisation malfeasance, and unearth the orgies of venality churning beneath the surface. At that very point, an officious type typically interjects that the accounts must be approved, and that the agenda must form the basis of any discourse.

Predictably, the collective vehemence in calling management and leadership to order invariably dissipates, as frustrated members pay greater attention to the hunger pangs gnawing with brutal determination while the official auditor recites their jargon uninterrupted.

Apart from an endemic allergy to numbers and indifference to financial information, what else explains the outrageous success rates of managers in evading accountability before general meetings? First of all, we are all betrayed by the widespread belief that financial records and books of accounts consist of parsimonious chronicles of compliances and delinquencies, which in turn implies that well-kept books should curate information on prima facie malpractice.

Consequently, there being none, and it being declared that they are properly kept, members are left with the distressing implication that no misconduct occurred in the year under review. Adopting the accounts fallaciously induces members to infer that the question of accountability is settled with finality.

Corporate accounting

Books of account record financial activity and provide conclusions on the state of an organisation as pertains its finances. Judgments about the implications of these records, or the transactions reflected thereby, full outside the remit of the accountant or auditor, and cannot properly be taken up under the agenda on accounts and financial statements. Therefore, members mobilising to sabotage the presentation of financials are ipso facto on a fool's errand, barking up the wrong tree, and so forth, and so on.

This scenario offers strong parallels with the null contest between medical expert witnesses and certain advocates during trial. There is a moment of intractable absurdity, when time acquires an oppressive viscosity, and the brain feels oppressed by leaden perplexity, as lawyers attempt to exonerate their client, or implicate their client's adversary, by attempting to induce a witness to make pronouncements, one way or the other, on responsibility, quite aside from causes, of injuries in question.

The licence we must appropriate in order to alight upon ambitious inferences, from limited factual material can have scandalous consequences, including the harmful culture of determining people's aptitude and worth on the basis of a singular set of tests.

The compound fallacy - of assailing the straw man and false appeal to authority - can be employed in the reverse direction. Outside court, a medical expert’s determination that the cause of A's death to be blunt trauma to the back of the head, and a witness statement indicating that a rungu was found in B's car, suffice to establish that B murdered A.

When corporate management state that factory records are maintained digitally, or that a reputable audit firm regularly inspects these records and have certified that proper accounts were kept at material times, it is labouring to suggest that despite abundant evidence of brazen looting, nothing is amiss, and we should be delighted to receive Sh17 when our peers are going home with Sh53 against an expectation of Sh60. For us, Sh43, give or take, separate corporate accounting from accountability.