Accounting

Taking the Bias Out of Bean Counting

Proposed changes by the SEC don’t go far enough to guarantee impartial audits by the accounting profession.

by

Max H. Bazerman

and

George Loewenstein

by

Max H. Bazerman

and

George Loewenstein

From the Magazine (January 2001)

The accounting profession has drawn heavy fire over the past year. Last January, the partners in one Big Five accounting firm were discovered to be holding investments in the companies they audited, a practice unambiguously forbidden under SEC rules. The scandal provoked the SEC to undertake a thorough review of the profession.

A version of this article appeared in the January 2001 issue of Harvard Business Review.

MB

Max H. Bazerman is the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the author (with Don A. Moore) of Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices (Yale University Press, 2022) and Better, Not Perfect: A Realist’s Guide to Maximum Sustainable Goodness (Harper Business, 2020).
GL

George Loewenstein is a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Taking the Bias Out of Bean Counting

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