Municipal accounting reform c. 1900: Ohio's progressive accountants

              The Accounting Historians Journal
Vol. 14, No. 1
Spring 1987
Richard. K. Fleischman JOHN CARROLL UNIVERSITY and
R. Penny Marquette UNIVERSITY OF AKRON
MUNICIPAL ACCOUNTING REFORM c. 1900: OHIO'S PROGRESSIVE ACCOUNTANTS
Abstract: Despite the fact that municipal accounting was a signifi-cant and permanent reform of the Progressive era, historians have failed to accord accountants proper credit for their leadership roles. Ohio was an important Progressive state and is particularly suited to an investigation of the contribution made by accountants. Ohio was the first state to require uniform municipal accounting and one of the first to inaugurate budgeting. Municipal research bureaus in major Ohio cities were among the most dynamic in the nation, inspiring important steps forward in cost accounting, budgeting, and the installation of accounting systems. Progressive municipal administrations came to depend increasingly on expert accountants to devise new systems and to audit the results.
INTRODUCTION
Municipal accounting was chaotic in the late nineteenth century. "Inaccurate," "unintelligible," "defective," and "un-fathomable" were only a few of the pejoratives used in account-ing literature to describe municipal books and systems. There was a singular lack of uniformity — different departments of the same government frequently used totally dissimilar systems. Accrual accounting was virtually unknown; budgeting was infrequent at best; auditing of the city books was rare; and cost accounting methods as basic as central purchasing and stores control were still a quarter-century in the future [Chase, 1902; Goodnow, 1904; Hamman, 1914; Hartwell, 1899]. This lack of accounting system and control was superimposed on an alarm-ing landscape of urban corruption. Cities, growing rapidly as a result of industrialization and immigration, were barely able to provide basic public services with honest administration. In the
The authors would like to thank the Editor and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.