Haskins & Sells at seventy-five;

              Experience is by industry achieved and perfected by the swift course of time."—Shakespeare
Haskins & Sells
at Seventy-Five
When, in the long journey that is life,
an organization passes the three-quar­ters
of a century milestone and moves
forward into the future, some of us
connected with it may pause to ask:
Why has Haskins & Sells survived
in the race, when so many others have
dropped out or disappeared before
seventy-five years? Why are we strong­er
than ever today when, in the same
time span, so many other organizations
pass their peak, wither and die? What
do we in this Firm have that is so spe­cial?
There is no simple answer, of course,
because Haskins & Sells is a large or­ganization,
a compound of many parts
and elements. At its start seventy-five
years ago it was merely a partnership
agreement between two men, Charles
Waldo Haskins and Elijah Watt Sells,
who opened their small office at No. 2
Nassau Street in the New York financial
district. Through the years from 1895
to 1970, the partnership they formed
has grown into one of the ranking firms
of independent accountants in the
world. Indeed, our offices, our people
and our services circle the globe.
No doubt, one reason for the success
of H&S over seventy-five years is that
it was solidly founded by two men of
great ability and industry, who were
dedicated to rendering the finest possi­ble
professional service to their clients.
Although Mr. Haskins lived through
but eight years of the Firm's early life,
Elijah Watt Sells remained at the helm
for twenty-nine years, until 1924. In
his time the profession of public ac­counting
came of age; and our Firm
under the leadership of Mr. Sells and
his partners grew to maturity with the
profession.
Another important reason for the
success of Haskins & Sells, I think, has
been our long-standing dedication to
improving and modernizing our meth­ods.
Back in the early 1920s, before I
joined H&S as an assistant accountant,
the Firm set aside most of the time of
John Wildman, Ed Kracke, Will Bell
and Ed Gause, four very important
partners, so that they could study situ­ations
that sometimes would go wrong
on an audit, and determine what we
could do to prevent them. As one part
of their study, these men carefully went
through several hundred cases of seri­ous
defalcations, and related them to
controls and procedures that might be
used to forestall such occurrences in
similar situations. From their work, in
the late Twenties, came our Firm's in­ternal
control questionnaire, an innova­tion
in public accounting that put us
well ahead of the field at that time.
It has been characteristic of H&S
through the years to invest time and
effort in development, in searching for
new and more effective ways to serve
our clients. We were never content to
be followers; it was our style to get
out in front and be leaders. For in­stance,
as early as the mid-1920s we
had made it a standard procedure to