Cowboy Accountants – The Lawless Frontier
Can you imagine accountants as American cowboys of the Wild, Wild West in the 1800s? I can. And they can be dangerous. Yeehaw! Yippee-i-o-i-a
In place of guns in their belt holsters the cowboy accountant may be carrying a smartphone. Their rodeo rope that cowboys use to catch running steers may be their audit controls manual. Cowboy accountants also wear well-shined wing-tipped dress shoes as their cowboy boots.
Why am I making light humor of accountants with a metaphor of them as cowboys? It is because they operate today in a lawless frontier no different than the Wild West. To be clear, I am not referring to external financial accounting but rather to the lawless frontier of internal managerial accounting used for internal analysis and decision making.