Personal code of business ethics;

              use among our clients, but it also looks forward to the
day when the entire information system will be put on
the computer.
We are also continuing our extensive training programs
in statistical sampling, applied not only to auditing but
also to the whole accounting process.
The new technologies in electronic data processing,
management sciences and Profitability Accounting are
not only difficult to understand but even harder to ex­plain.
And it is on this technique of explaining or teach­ing—
popularizing, if you will—that we are concentrating
particularly hard right now.
Involved and complicated as they are, these new dis­ciplines
must be distilled down to their simplest elements
and skilfully interpreted so that they can be communi­cated
and understood by non-technical client manage­ment.
We have excellent technical people who understand
these new disciplines and today it must be part of their
job to educate general service partners so that they in
turn can inform the clients and make them enthusiastic
about the rich new opportunities that are open to them.
This is all part of the training program.
3. Lastly, if we are to grow, we must excel in research.
We have already conducted much valuable research and
it's highly important that this go on. We would stagnate
without it.
In the meantime it is important to coordinate and
implement the results of research already completed and
to distribute it to the people in the field who need it.
Many industrial firms, too, are recognizing the desirabil­ity
of marketing the research they already have done.
We must keep our research from getting locked up in the
minds of the researchers.
We have already taken steps in this direction. In audit­ing,
for example, we have a forward-looking program
which will result in all of our research being system­atically
documented and circulated to all offices. But be­yond
this, we are working toward a permanent system for
all professional and scientific areas that will organize,
preserve and apply research reports which might other­wise
be filed and forgotten in places where no one would
think of looking for them.
This, then, is the configuration of Touche, Ross, Bailey
& Smart, and it is also in a large measure the "new
look" which much of our profession is assuming in order
to supply the guidance system for space-age business in a
new and unfamiliar orbit. As auditors, we in our profes­sion
have traditionally been characterized as people who
do nothing but check and double check, as routine per­formers
who sit around all day making tick marks up
and down a column of figures. Those days are gone
forever. The auditor today must be more interested in
internal control and the flow of data in management
information systems than he is in the reconciliation of
bank accounts and the aging of accounts receivable,
necessary as these procedures may be.
Today the TRB&S man is first and foremost a business
man. He must understand the entire business process, lest
he fail to see the forest for the trees. He must see the
real meaning of the figures and information which march
before him if he is to give management answers it needs.
If we meet these specifications, we can be sure that
we will always be a strong firm, one with a future for all
of us. It will not be an easy thing, but we must forever
be sure of keeping alive the talents necessary to provide
our clients with total service on an integrated basis, and
not only must we have such talents but we must let busi­ness
know that we have them.
Robert K. Mautz is professor of accountancy at the University of Illinois. His essay won first
place recently in a contest held to create a code that could be observed by business,students as
well as the individual businessman.
The contest was sponsored by the Alpha Kappa Psi Foundation, a non profit foundation
established in 1951 by Alpha Kappa Psi Fraternity, a national professional business
fraternity. Its purpose is to educate the public in economic principles and to conduct research
in business and educational subjects.
THE QUARTERLY