Answering questions;

              66 HASKINS & SELLS September
Answering Questions
" H O W much are you short?" asks the
surety company representative who
detects irregularities intuitively, or by
walking through an office and looking a
cashier in the eye. "What is the amount
of the shortage?" queries the employer
whose employee has confessed to having
misappropriated funds. "What did you
find?" asks the client of the accountants
who have investigated some matter for
him.
It is but natural that these questions
should be asked; that they should be
abrupt, short, and pointed. The seeker
after information wastes no time or words
in phrasing his questions. He is not con­cerned
with the niceties of expression. He
even may sacrifice grammatical construc­tion
as long as no doubt may arise as to the
meaning.
The chances are that answers to such
questions would meet with high favor were
they equally terse, provided they were to
convey the specific information sought.
Every question requires some kind of
answer. A direct question calls for a
direct answer. An implied question may
not be ignored if satisfaction is to be ac­corded
to the privileged party in a rela­tionship.
How often does a client receive a direct
answer in reply to a direct question asked
of a lawyer or of an accountant? Seldom.
The reply usually is hedged about with
qualifications and protective phrases such
as, "We are informed," or "It appears," or
equally non-committal statements. This
all may be necessary if the statement is a
matter requiring proof but it must be fairly
unsatisfactory to the client.
How many times is a layman able to
understand a legal document because of
the "whereases," "said parties," and so on?
Is it not tiresome to be obliged to read page
upon page of legal verbiage and study at
length certain passages in order to under­stand
the terms of a simple contract?
Put yourself in the place of a client who
asks you to investigate some matter for
him which he has neither the time nor
technical ability to penetrate and when he
receives your report is unable to tell what
your conclusions are without reading thou­sands
of words and searching out the con­clusions
for himself. Is he likely to be
pleased? He is not.
Every engagement carries with it a ques­tion
either expressed or implied. If the
question is expressed, so much the better.
If the implication has to be read out of the
engagement, the question is none the less
present. In either event an answer is re­quired.
The question is the prevailing
thought in the client's mind. He is en­titled
to expect an answer. He is entitled
to have the answer conveyed to him with a
minimum of effort on his part in order to
grasp it. He is entitled to the substance
of the answer immediately upon picking up
the report.
It is surprising the extent to which
accountants ignore the simple principles of
service relationship. The perfectly obvi­ous
requirements of successful contact in
business are sacrificed to form day in, day
out. Instead of telling a client immedi­ately
in a few well chosen words the par­ticular
thing he wishes to know, pages are
devoted to discussion which is involved,
technical, filled with formal detail, and
qualified to a high degree.
A review of twenty-five reports dealing
with special investigations will not show
one which summarizes the findings in the
opening paragraph of the presentation or
the comments. In most instances the con­clusions
appear, if at all, in the last para­graph
of the comments, to be found only
after reading pages of detail ranging from
two to forty-seven. Scarcely ever will the
reports where shortages are involved dis­close
the amount of the shortage until the
reader has searched through five or six
pages.