Digital Financial Reporting

This is a translation of Luca Pacioli's book which mentioned double-entry bookkeeping. This was apparently created by a CPA in Denver, Colorado in 1914.

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a declarative logic problem solving approach based in stable model semantics.  It is tailored to modeling problems in the area of knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR). Frankly, most of this is over my head.  But, answer set programming seems like it is a step in the right direction.  Here are some resources:

• University of Vienna
• Knowledge Representation, Reasoning, and the Design of Intelligent Agents The Answer-Set Programming Approach
• Potassco
• Answer Set Programming Tutorial
• Online demo
• Clingo
• Answer Set Programming in Practice

It seems like answer set programming is similar to description logic.

This is an excellent video, Will Accountants Be Replaced By Robots (And What Can You Do About It)? It is an hour and six minutes long, so a bit of an investment, but it is worth watching.  Interestingly, it was published in 2015.

The most interesting thing about this video to me was this person's statement that accountants should control the business logic of systems, not the IT department.  No system should be a "black box" or require the accounting department to rely on the IT department to change business logic or processes.

I completely agree with that statement.  As artificial ingelligence us employed to automate more and more things over the next 30 years, professional accountants need to take back what they gave away during the last 50 years.  Understanding business logic and tools for working with that logic are key.

Accounting existed before writing and numbers, invented 10,000 years ago.  Like writing and numbers, computers are just a tool.  A very powerful tool, but a tool none-the-less.  Do you really want the tool makers controlling your craft?

In a presentation at South by Southwest March 21, 2015, How Bitcoin will Disrupt Accounting and Auditing, LibraTax CEO Jake Benson summarized the impact of blockchain technology as follows:

"Accountants and Auditors are financial doctors.  We've just given them penicillin."

I did a post on digital distributed ledgers a while back. That is worth reading through.  Also, watch this video by Alex Tapscott, in particular between minutes 8:30 and 11:00 in the presentation.

I now understand specifically how accountants made the top 5 list of those who will be losing their jobs to automation.

More to come...

Remember The Data Act?  Well, Rep. Darrell Issa (Republican from California) is giving it a shot again.  He has introduced the Financial Transparency Act of 2017.

To amend securities, commodities, and banking laws to make the information reported to financial regulatory agencies electronically searchable, to enable RegTech applications, and for other purposes.

We shall see...