ABSTRACT
Accounting historians have tended to underestimate the amount of testing in the early audits. Littleton (1981: 312), in his survey of lectures published in the Accountant in the 1880s, found that ‘so little is said regarding the way to test-check that the conclusion is inescapable that very little of it was done’. Lee (1988: xviii) also concluded that there is ‘little evidence of test checking prior to 1900’; while Brown (1968: 698) dated its implementation to the 1890s. Indeed, the first edition of Pixley’s (1881: 164) textbook laid down: ‘A thorough and efficient audit should embrace an examination of all the transactions of a Company’, and the book still contained this wording in the tenth edition (Pixley 1910: 541). Victorian accountants like Quilter, as we noted above, would be reluctant (as with the fact that they were also doing their clients’ accounting) to admit that they did not check everything since they were conscious of the criticism their work was receiving, in part as a result of the well publicised court cases involving audit failures in the 1880s and 1890s, such as those involving the Leeds Estate, Building and Investment company, the Liberator Permanent Benefit Building Society or the Millwall Dock company (Accountant 15 May 1909: 687-96). Indeed, in a legal judgement in 1885 it was declared to be the duty ‘of an auditor to check and verify by vouchers or otherwise every item before he passed it’ (quoted in Chandler 1997: 64, his italics).
