A book at bedtime?

According to a survey conducted on World Book Day last year, accountants read more for pleasure than many other professionals. It was estimated that accountants spend an average of more than five hours per week reading their favourite choices. Five hours may not sound much, but in the modern busy world it represents quite an investment of time to devote to reading - certainly more than the MPs, journalists and teachers surveyed were able to put in.

The majority of the accountants who responded to the survey had shuffled off to bed with their texts, or buried their heads in a good book while commuting to the office. More intriguing, it turned out that humorous literature was very popular with the profession, together with fantasy novels such as those of J R R Tolkein. The favourite classic fiction writer was Jane Austen with Pride and Prejudice as the favourite title, revealing a surprising romantic streak among number crunchers. As soon as the news was out, of course, senior members of the profession were quick to announce that there was nothing surprising at all about this information, as everyone knows what a varied and cultured group accountants are and how different from the stereotyped image of boring people in suits. No doubt this is true. But do accountants appreciate what has been written about them and their profession in imaginative literature?

About 35% of accountants surveyed admitted to liking crime fiction. One of the greatest writers of such fiction in the 19th century, Charles Dickens, gave accountancy mixed treatment. As the son of a father who had very poor money management skills, was chronically in debt and even imprisoned for his failure to pay up, Dickens had no great love for financial contracts, loans, taxes and indebtedness of all kinds. Frankly, it embarrassed and worried him. Perhaps for this reason some of those characters who record financial information, or show too great an interest in money, are not very attractive either physically or in behaviour. The exception to this negative image is Bob Cratchett in A Christmas Carol. Cratchett is the perfect and modest bookkeeper who scratches away busily with his pen in a ledger (you had to have a large thick ledger book in the 19th century to be taken seriously), keeping a faithful account of Mr Scrooge's transactions while managing to remain unperturbed by the harsh treatment he receives from this classic employer from hell.

The story is well known all over the world and is synonymous with the mean treatment of employees, as well as meanness in every other kind of personal relationship. Scrooge could always be relied on to sacrifice decency for money. But how and why does poor Bob keep his temper under all this provocation and not sling his pen into one of the many dark corners in his office and go and find another job? The moral which Bob held, according to Dickens, was: 'Duty cheerfully performed'. Loosely interpreted, it means that it did not matter whether working for Scrooge was interesting or advantageous. Actually, Bob's experience was far from advantageous as he could hardly get half a day off work for a public holiday. But given it was the only work that Cratchett had at that time, and that he had a number of seriously dependant dependants, he may as well go about it as cheerfully as he could and not give in to the manic behaviour of his boss, or his depressing environment.

Truth is always stranger than fiction as they say, and if any of the 19% of accountants who admitted to liking biography were reading the story of Al Capone, they would find some cheering information which demonstrates that accounting can be a thrilling occupation. Capone, the terrible 1920s mobster who terrorised Chicago during a time of lawlessness and corruption, was not captured and imprisoned as a result of police investigation into his organised crime activities.

In spite of his blatant violence and intimidation, the law enforcement authorities had always found it impossible to find witnesses who were not too terrified to speak against Capone or who could make a strong case with which to bring him to court. The most he had been charged with up to 1931 was the crime of carrying a gun, which only demonstrated how weak the authorities were. At the height of his powers, so the popular story goes, Capone was public enemy number one in his home city and the controller of a huge illegal gambling operation.

However, and this remains an example to us all, the Special Investigation Service of the Revenue division discovered that Capone had never filed any personal income tax returns. He was reported as boasting that the income tax law (by which he meant the Sullivan Ruling of 1927) was rubbish, and that his illegal earnings could never be taxed. The ruling stated that, contrary to popular wisdom, illegal earnings were taxable and so began the search for the financial records which would incriminate Capone, a search which was later dramatised in the film The Untouchables and in books, articles and popular folklore ever since.

The figures are impressive. Capone was fined $80,000 for his failure to file returns and pay income tax on the fortune he amassed between 1925 and 1929. The actual tax payable on his income was estimated at around $200,000 of which only around half was paid by Capone's release from jail in 1939.

The interesting point for accountants reading this tale is that the man who finally led the investigators to this particular ledger, Eddie O'Hare, was not a well-known gangland killer, but a bookkeeper who had been responsible for writing up the figures for Capone's track-racing business. The mob leader was caught by a team of daring tax officials who were, for once, the good guys.

Over 21% of accountancy bookworms stated their preference for reading history for pleasure. The most famous English historical inventory, the Domesday Book, is unlikely to have been one of them; the writers are unknown and the language is challenging. History buffs might be more entertained by reading about the 15th century Italian mathematician, Luca Pacioli, who developed double-entry bookkeeping in the basic form that we use today.

There are a number of interesting writings describing how he used the work of previous Italian mathematicians to produce a whole mathematical treatise which was distributed in Venice, the great European trading city. His advice on bookkeeping was an adaptation of a formula which would suit the needs of the many small-scale merchants in his native Tuscany. In spite of their modest businesses, merchants still required quite extensive records of capital and credit and needed to estimate their trading position by glancing into the ledger, rather than by spending half a day in study. Pacioli could also impress with the names of his friends: 'As I was talking to Leonardo...'

All of which goes to prove, as if any proof were necessary, that accountants can be important characters in literature as well as devoted readers. This still leaves me wondering which character in Pride and Prejudice - the novel accountants all said they admired - would be the most attractive. It cannot be Mr D'Arcy, as he had other people to see to the books of his estates, but it could be Mr Wykham, the accountant's anti-hero, who loses his inheritance, gambles his income but finally discovers the value of a portable asset in the form of his wife. Happy reading.

Etain Casey is a lecturer at the English Language Centre, King's College London, UK