Age of Accountability

One of the things that I have been working on lately is the concept of accountability. As we continue to move through life as it changes at unprecedented rates of speed, we have to adapt. As we emerge from this pandemic, and we are faced with the facism that has taken hold in the U.S., I believe we need a way to make sense of what exactly happened so we can fix it before it is too late.

In my career as a CPA and an educator, I have witnessed some incredible progress related to accountability. It started with performance plans, moved to competency based evaluations and also reinforced the value of ethical behaviours. Despite all of those things, we are facing a world filled with greed and corruption which is driving a level of polarization that I believe we have never seen before. Despite all of the tools to measure and monitor performance and behaviour, there is still a gap – our willingness and ability to hold people accountable. As human beings, we discuss the concepts of equity and equality. We include diversity and inclusion in our values and yet people are still able to get away with unethical, and at times illegal, actions without repercussion. In order to address this I believe that our next step in the process for improvement and equity is to look at building in an accountability framework.

The pandemic shifted paradigms. It exposed beliefs and behaviours that have been lingering under the surface for years. “People are saying the quiet stuff out loud.” (I put this in quotes to acknowledge that I am not the person who coined the phrase and I am not sure how to figure out who said it first.) I honestly grew up believing that we as a society were progressing. We abolished slavery, we gave the right to vote to women. We were working towards a world of progressive human rights,,,or so I thought. I had no idea how deep the patriarchy, racism and misogyny ran. I had very little idea of the atrocities that we inflicted on our Indigenous populations. I truly had no idea just how naive I have been.

In all of this chaos, I do believe there is some hope. As fleeting as that might feel given what is happening in the U.S. right now, we lack mechanisms to hold people accountable. We need to focus on putting those mechanisms back in place and making them unavoidable. There are many triggers to this current circumstance. Economic, social, personal, financial are just some. I believe that what we are seeing in the U.S. is just how the “Checks and Balances” they have celebrated for years was based on a level of decorum. The respect for process and history has been their key control. This current administration respects none of it. What we are now seeing is just how weak their processes actually are giving the expansive changes that have been made. They ignore decorum from a procedural perspective as well as a behavioral perspective. They are going unchecked and unbalanced. The amount of destruction and regression they have produced is unprecedented. My hope is that it will be curbed with the implementation of controls to formally install the checks and balances. Let’s hope it is not too late.