Military influences on the evolution of public sector audit and accounting 1830–1880

Abstract

Accounting historians have turned their attention to the contributions of military manufacturing establishments and personnel in their search to establish the origins and uses of techniques which were to become the precursors of modern management accounting. In this paper military influences are shown to have been significant also in the evolution of modern public sector audit and accounting in Britain in the nineteenth century. Parliaments still suspicious of their military establishments, both navy and army, finally realised in the early 1830s that controls over spending levels were insufficient to ensure that the wishes of parliament were being followed. Audit reforms in the defence departments to strengthen executive accountability to parliament were extended to all departments in 1866. These innovations were to determine the accounting and auditing practices of government departments in Britain and other Westminster governments for over a century until the managerial reforms of the 1980s.