We need a Garret for those long tots in Europe

In five years of allegedly studying accountancy at secondary level I have to say that never once did the balance work out - we knew it as the “riaru fuighleach” but it might as well have had its name in Greek. 

That’s why I have some sympathy for a guy who gets his balances dramatically wrong as Kevin Cardiff did, though for the life of me I can’t understand how you would not try to straighten out a figure involving more than €3 billion.

In my day you simply would fiddle the figures, making adjustments all over the place and then handing in a “trial balance” with the figures looking “middling right”, but knowing that there was no way they would pass the eagle eye of whoever was correcting the exams.

One presumes that Cardiff was operating “double entry system” which should be foolproof. In other words, if the business buys something you make a deduction and pay with one transaction balancing the other.

My difficulty always was that there were any number of other books in the system like Cash Books, Journal and ‘whatever you are having yourself’. The whole thing, to my mind was too big a structure and I inevitably missed entries in the Cash Book, the Journal, but not in the Ledger, where there was some semblance of control.

I doubt a student even as inept as myself could have ‘lost’ €3.5 billion in the books during the year and the kernel of the difficulty in this case appears to have been whether a particular transaction was a debt or a credit and in the end it went down as two debits coming up with that fantastic figure of €3.6 billion.

In my day, my difficulty usually involved one schilling and 10 pence or some ludicrous figure, and then you had to trawl through the books in the hope that it might be a single transaction involving something like a packet of fags. I usually came up with two shillings and now I was tuppence out and had doubts about some other entries in the books of this imaginary company.

Like Sherlock Holmes I wound up trawling through cash books, and journals which, if I remember correctly, were known as the “early entry” books. Now my problem was that in ‘fiddling’ these in an effort to get the balance right, the problem was getting bigger by the minute.

I could never understand how some seemed to sail through the preparation of figures like these while I got more and more enmeshed in the technicalities of the system which is supposed to be simple but which probably needs, above all, a methodical mind.

I think we can take it that given that the Department of Finance regularly gets its predictions and figures wrong that they also could do with a few ordinary minds that could run a book keeping system however exotic and however difficult the predictions.

The late Garret FitzGerald was ‘the Man’ to tackle problems like these. Had he been in Cabinet, surely there is not the remotest chance that figures with a €3.6 billion hole in them could have got through. The stories about FitzGerald and ‘long tots’ at Cabinet are legend.

Indeed I remember on one occasion when I was in the office outside the Cabinet room and one of the Cabinet came out, plainly frustrated. What had happened was that FitzGerald found a mistake in a huge column of figures and was now checking just about everything.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.