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ABSTRACT
Professional accounting associations have long been a part of the accounting profession. This paper provides a brief summary of these organizations since their origin in Scotland. Professional accounting organizations quickly spread to England and Wales. Shortly thereafter they appeared in Europe and the United States. The development of these organizations is traced in this paper to the current American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) in the United States. An introduction into the origins of accounting precedes a discussion of the development of professional accounting associations which had their beginnings in Scotland with the creation of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (ICAS) in 1854. These professional organizations quickly spread throughout the world and have had a major influence on the practice of accountancy.
Key words: Accounting associations, American Accounting Association (AAA), Royal Charter of 1854, Chartered Accountant
INTRODUCTION
The history of accounting is thousands of years old and can be traced back to 4000 B.C. where records of income from temples in lower Mesopotamia have been discovered (ICAEW, 2015). According to Peragallo, the earliest double entry records were found in the "Massari Ledgers" of 1340 of the Commune of Genoa which is nearly 150 years earlier than Luca Pacioli's "Summa" was first published in 1494 (Peragallo, 1956). This origin of double entry has not been confirmed. Therefore, Franciscan Friar and mathematician Luca Pacioli continues to be recognized as the "Father of Accounting and Bookkeeping." The "Summa" contained a 27 page treatise on bookkeeping that laid the foundation for our current double entry system. The text was sold primarily to merchants as a reference text. The "Summa" was the first known text to contain algebra and introduced the symbols for plus and minus which became standard notation in Italian Renaissance mathematics (Sangster, Stoner, McCarthy, 2007). Although Pacioli did not invent the debit-credit double entry bookkeeping system, he likely created the first known published work on the subject.
Following Pacioli's contribution to accountancy, multitudes of similar manuscripts were published within the next fifty years. According to the ICAEW timeline, one of the first English texts on the subject was a work by Hugh Oldcastle whose title included the phrases "to leam to know the good order of keeping books" using "Debitor and Creditor"...