October marks Ethics Month. For chartered accountants, however, ethics has no calendar.
WE WORK IN A PROFESSION that places enormous confidence in technical precision. Figures must reconcile. Evidence must withstand scrutiny. Judgements must be defensible. Yet some of the most consequential decisions made by finance professionals will never be settled by arithmetic alone.
They require us to decide what is fair.
Equity is an interesting word for an accountant. In financial reporting, it is the residual interest after liabilities have been deducted from assets. In society, equity speaks to fairness in how people encounter opportunity, resources and institutions.
Perhaps the two meanings are not as distant as they appear.
What is the residual interest of our professional lives? After the qualifications, appointments, remuneration and recognition have been accounted for, what remains because we were there?
That, I believe, is where stewardship begins.
STEWARDSHIP CHANGES THE QUESTION
Was the expenditure authorised? Was procurement compliant? Was the appointment procedurally correct? Did the transaction satisfy the applicable standard?
These questions are indispensable. But ethical stewardship introduces another: what did the decision produce, and for whom?
A process can be procedurally impeccable while repeatedly producing narrow participation. An enterprise can create impressive financial value while the ecosystem around it remains remarkably unchanged.
This does not necessarily establish wrongdoing. It reveals something more nuanced: compliance and fairness are not synonyms.
That distinction matters profoundly in South Africa.
We practise within an economy shaped by inherited disparities in education, ownership, networks and capital. Equity therefore cannot be reduced to benevolence, nor should it be mistaken for diluted standards. It asks whether the systems through which people compete, progress and participate are themselves capable of recognising talent fairly.
That is an institutional question − and chartered accountants routinely influence institutions.
THE BALANCE SHEET WE NEVER PUBLISH
Our work places us unusually close to the machinery through which resources move. We influence budgets, investment, procurement, remuneration, appointments, risk and performance. Even when we do not make the final decision, our analysis often determines which choices appear economically credible.
Perhaps, then, stewardship has an unwritten balance sheet. Its assets are what became stronger under our custody: institutional trust, capability, sound judgement and economic participation. Its liabilities include what we normalised because challenging it was inconvenient: avoidable exclusion, opaque decision-making and concentrated opportunity.
The true balance sheet
So perhaps Ethics Month should leave us with a more demanding test: when I exercise judgement, what assumptions am I leaving unexamined? When I influence resources, what behaviour does that allocation perpetuate? And when my stewardship ends, what will remain that did not exist before I arrived?
Perhaps that is the true balance sheet of a steward. Not simply what passed through our hands, but what became more credible, more capable and more just because, for a period, it was entrusted to us.
Author
Cindy Masikane CA(SA)
FMVA
