For USC's Jacob Soll, it’s time good accountants get the respect—and historical spotlight—they deserve.
Jacob Soll packs up to leave a café in West Los Angeles, and suddenly stops. He forgot something: his receipt.
After all, his snack was a business expense, Soll says, hailing a server. “You need to think like an accountant,” he adds.
And he always does. For Soll, 46, tracking money is about more than staving off a tax audit. “Accounting is the hidden structure behind our entire lives,” he explains. In other words, it’s an accountant’s world; we just live in it.
In 2014, the scholar of accounting and MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient published The Reckoning, a cultural history about the craft of crunching numbers and how openness in bookkeeping is crucial to government. The book earned widespread acclaim.
Is God Running the Numbers?