Professor Christine Cooper (Accounting and Finance) participated in a BBC Radio 4 series, A Brief History of Double Entry Book Keeping, on March 18.Professor Christine Cooper (Accounting and Finance) participated in a BBC Radio 4 series, A Brief History of Double Entry Book Keeping, on March 18.
Professor Cooper spoke about the way in which double entry bookkeeping was not used by the US Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) which ran Iraq after the war: "CPA's compliance with basic levels of decent public administration were akin to Guantanamo's compliance with basic levels of natural justice. The CPA's very poor administration of Iraq was reflected in its accounting systems. The accounting systems demonstrated that Professor Cooperthe CPA was a chaotic administration which spent billions without proper controls or procedures and left precious Iraqi oil revenues open to fraudulent acts."
She stated that after the chaos of war, it could be argued that Iraqis needed help - good advice and ample resources, and certainly an administration which would bring some order to the chaos instead of a system where precious resources could be spent 'without proper record keeping and decent financial controls'.