accountant

Accountancy British EnglishBrESYN AmE Accounting is the profession or work done by an accountant. A bookkeeper is someone whose job is to make an official record of all the money received into and paid out of a business. This activity is called bookkeeping. An auditor is a specialist accountant who carries out an audit, which is a check on the truth and honesty of a company’s accounts (=records showing money coming into and going out of a business). Auditors are independent, not employees of a company whose accounts they are checking. In the US, auditors check to see if a company’s accounts obey the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), a set of rules about how things should be shown in financial records. Accountants in many other countries, including countries in the European Union, use a similar set of accounting standards called the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). After the introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, all US public companies must send a yearly report to the Securities and Exchange Commission showing that the financial accounts are correct and true in every detail.