Accounting in Partnerships
以安达信会计师事务所的兴衰为例，探讨专业服务合伙制企业中的合伙人薪酬方案及其背后的会计信息系统，对理解此类组织的激励机制有参考价值。
In 1914, an accounting professor named Arthur Andersen founded a public accounting practice that became the world’s largest professional-services firm. For years preceding the Enron debacle and Andersen’s collapse, the firm had struggled to create incentives within the organization for partners to provide high-quality service, develop and sell new services, and meet the compensation expectations of various factions of partners. A years-long dispute over the division of profits between the firm’s consulting and accounting arms led to the 1998 separation of the consulting practice from the audit and tax practices. The rise, break-up and fall of Andersen underlines the importance of questions concerning incentive structures within public accounting firms in particular, and partnerships of professionals in general. This paper offers a perspective on partner compensation schemes and the accounting information systems that support them.