I love this book. It is subtitled “Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations.” I’ll have more to say about it later. For now, here are some cool quotes:
“For the most part, Athenians preferred public slaves as comptrollers and auditors because they could be tortured on the rack and freemen could not.”
“The historian Polybius noted that even if the state had ten auditors and as many official seals and public witnesses, it still could not ensure someone’s honesty. The clever, he implied, could still cook their books.”
“As in Athens, state accounting in Rome was haphazard, and fraud was common. In his Phillippics, Cicero complained of bad accounts in his attacks on Mark Antony … Returning to power later that year … Mark Antony hunted down Cicero and had his head and hands chopped off and displayed in the Forum. This grimly illustrates a constant maxim: the powerful don’t respond well to those who call for their books to be opened …”
… and, bringing things forward to more recent events …
“Six years later, it is not just banks that are threatened by financial crisis brought on by bad bookkeeping. Leading nations – the United States, European countries, and China – find themselves facing their own larger potential crises of accounting and accountability.”