Opinion
TONY TINKER
Issue date: 3/14/05 Section:
At the time of writing, Abraham Briloff lies in intensive care in a Long Island hospital, recovering from a car accident. Abraham Briloff is an Emeritus Professor of Baruch College. According to George Foster, a distinguished professor at Stanford University, Abe Briloff is “the most famous accountant in the World”. Briloff is the only academic — ever — whose publications contained enough information-content to change the stock prices of major corporations. His books have been translated into several languages and his name is revered from Sydney to Paris, from Hong Kong to London. Briloff’s Unaccountable Accounting is required reading in many universities across the globe, and no other American accounting academic has had his testimony read into the Congressional Record (twice) and is able to proudly display a signed note from Congressman Sarbanes, thanking him for his contribution in shaping the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation.
What does Briloff mean to Baruch? Well, Harvard has its $1 million endowment for every student, Yale has the same, and even flashy NYU has $300,000. Baruch has Briloff. Make no mistake; if it were not for Abraham Briloff, Baruch wouldn’t be on the map.
Briloff has always challenged the orthodoxy, and thus was perfectly at home in CUNY’s Baruch. Back to the 1960s, The Accounting Review (a so-called elite journal) told Briloff that his article submissions were no longer welcome. Fortunately, almost no-one reads The Accounting Review, but thousands of investors read Barron’s and The Wall Street Journal, and thus Briloff turned to these outlets and produced a stream of articles that earned him national and international acclaim. Unfortunately, the reception was not so warm among mainstream academics and the then Big 8 accounting firms and their corporate clients. The chilly relationship manifested itself again in 1980 when this writer organized an American Accounting Association panel, and invited Briloff and Stanley Sporkin to participate. Within 24 hours of announcing the names of the panelists, every one of the Big 8 accounting firms “independently” withdrew their funding from the event.
What is truly astonishing is that Abraham Briloff is clinically blind, and that his investigations into the financial statements of large corporations require someone to read the financial statements to him. Until recently, the Accountancy Department supplied a doctoral student just for that task.
The kind of diversity that Briloff offers Baruch isn’t race or gender diversity; it is intellectual diversity. In an age of acute budgetary pressures, he refused to succumb to pressures to silence his criticisms of the Big 4 and their corporate clients. He earned the wrath of university colleagues by alleging that the arid research of the accounting mainstream opened the door to Enron et al. From the late 1990s onward, he railed against the buccaneering and greed that destroyed the fabric of trust and integrity in financial statements that are indispensable to a healthy market economy. His concerns about failure in the ‘groves of academe’ may be read in, “Unaccountable Accounting Revisited,” Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Vol. 4, No. 4, 1993, pp. 301-336. After all is said and done, many — including many in the Big 4 — now acknowledge that Briloff was right.
A week before his accident, this writer and Professor Aida Sy visited Briloff in his new office, where he outlined (what he described as) his valedictory work, in which he was exposing the intergeneration abuses inherent in current pension and environmental policies. For Briloff, these are matters of “accountability” and therefore proper subject for accounting research. We hope that this will be published in the Critical Perspectives on Accounting (this journal has always had an open door to Briloff’s writings, ever since his worked was shunned by mainstream journals).
At a conference to be held in Baruch in April, the Critical Perspectives Journal will announce the formation of a “Friends of Abraham Briloff Society,” and — in conjunction with Baruch’s Newman Library — A “Virtual Abe” (Online Library), designed to support research conducted in Briloff’s manner. Membership is open (and free); just contact this author at: Tony_Tinker@baruch.cuny.edu
Abe’s criticisms of accounting have been vindicated by history. Let’s wish him a speedy recovery so that we may soon have him back on active duty.
The author is a professor of accountancy at Baruch College. He is indebted to Professor Deep Moat, for helpful comments on an earlier draft. The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author’s alone, and do not reflect those of NABA of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants.