Accountability is important, because without it, there’s no where to place the blame when mistakes occur. In fact, accountability covers more than just blameworthiness; responsibility, answerability, and liability also come into question when discussing the importance of accountability. The very application of the word, describes a system, in which actions, decisions, and policies are all accounted for (or: kept track of, recorded, and assessed and evaluated).
Accountability can even extend into the administration of new policies, that are rendered due to obsolete rules and regulations or just out-right compliancy issues; the governance of decisions that define expectations or verify one’s performance– as well as managing and guiding one’s decisions and processes for completing a task, also comes into play; finally, the obligation to report, explain, and be answerable to resulting consequences when implementing those actions is quite significant.
To put it simply, when taking accountability for something, you are acknowledging and assuming responsibility for your actions. If I go further in depth with this particular topic, we can see that this system of accountability can actually be created by breaking down the very word “accountability,” into separate synonyms (words that have the same or similar meaning) and can be categorized as such. The word “count,” in “accountability” implies the action of finding the number of elements of a finite set of objects.
The traditional way of counting consists of continually increasing a (mental or spoken) counter by a unit for every element of the set, in some order, while marking (or displacing) those elements to avoid visiting the same element more than once, until no unmarked elements are left; if the counter was set to one after the first object, the value after visiting the final object gives the desired number of elements. The related term enumeration refers to uniquely identifying the elements of a finite (combinatorial) set or infinite set by assigning a number to each element.
Essentially, I have just defined the word “count,” described the process of counting, and explained the purpose of counting (to find the number of elements in a set of like objects). You can’t define the importance of accountability, without bringing up the topic of counting. What do you think accounting is? Calculating those very elements, that you or someone else counted and then recorded, and interpreting the results from those variables (the ones you counted in order to assign a numerical value).
The process goes as such: counting the number of elements (or objects, such as people, equipment, etc. ), recording the value of those elements recieved from the “count method,” classifying those numbers into their respective variables, operating on those variables in different ways to simulate different scenarios or events, summarizing the significance of each calculation, and interpreting the results of these mathematical processes. Now, if I really want to go in depth with this particular topic, I could discuss the principles of accountancy.
Accountancy is nothing more than the communication of financial information about a business entity to users such as shareholders and managers. This very process describes the profession and duties of an accountant, I would like to discuss a prime example of this later on in my essay. The principles of accountancy are applied to business entities in three divisions of practical art, named accounting, bookkeeping, and auditing. According to history, early accounts served mainly to assist the memory of the businessperson and the audience for the account was the proprietor or record keeper alone.
The definition of the word Accountability and its root word and synonyms should be clear now, but the derivitive is also significant. The word “Accountant” is derived from the French word Compter, which took its origin from the Latin word Computare. The word was formerly written in English as “Accomptant”, but in the process of time the word, which was always pronounced by dropping the “p”, became gradually changed both in pronunciation and in orthography to its present form. Accountability” stems from late Latin accomptare (to account), a prefixed form of computare (to calculate), which in turn derived from putare (to reckon). While the word itself does not appear in English until its use in 13th century Norman England, the concept of account-giving has ancient roots in record keeping activities related to governance and money-lending systems that first developed in Ancient Israel, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, and later, Rome.
If anything, accountants are like human computers, by definition at least; there is no better example, I think, than marine corps disbursing agents. They are the military version of accountants. Think of the them as portable PX’s or Banks. They take your needs into account and they make disbursements (payments) to you. All of the traits/characteristics of the word “accountability,” also help to serve the Marine. How?
It takes honor to be able to take accountability, because you need the Integrity to follow your ethics and be responsible for your actions. By policing your own, and taking accountability for how many marines that you’re in charge of, you can also gain more leadership skills. Marines will also have to take account of their uniform, gear, and their own emotions. An accountable Marine is not only a dependable Marine, but also an organized and effectient one. Take into consideration of all of these accounts, because a “smart warrior, is a strong warrior. “
