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Jargon and drab rooms a way of life for accountants, HK researcher says

"The room, once again, was filled with only the noise of the clicking of keys on the computer keyboard or calculator,."

From a report on accountants by Hong Kong City University

Research proves it: accountants are boring.

A Hong Kong professor named Flowerdew has concluded that accountants use anything but flowery language in their work and find immense difficulty when creativity is required.

The report by John Flowerdew, a professor in Hong Kong City University's department of English and communication, and Alina Wan of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, found accountants rely on jargon-loaded, formulaic language and work in a drab environment.

The study, published in an international research journal, English for Specific Purposes, examined tax computation letters accountants used for filing tax returns to the Inland Revenue department.

Researchers based their study on the language and communication between tax accountants in a multi-national accounting firm in Hong Kong. They conducted observations and interviews with the employees.

The study found they talk of "provisional tax liability, assessment, holdover, nontaxable and enclosures."

Flowerdew said the accountants rely on templates to write letters and they have difficulty deviating from the standard format.

"There is one section of the letter where they actually have to be a bit creative, where they have to give comments or interpretations about the tax statements.

"So they are worried about these sections ... Some of them have difficulty in writing," said Flowerdew, who said the area has not been investigated by linguists.

To develop a sense of tax accountants at work, one of the researchers sat in with them for a week and directly observed and recorded their behavior.

It was not very exciting.

"The tax accountants had their own office, in a rather drab gray-colored room. They sat together in a group with their desks facing each other while the tax manager had her own office apart from the tax accountants," the report said.

It said the accountants worked "seemingly unaware of each other, busy combing through tax computation schedules, fidgeting with calculators and inputting data into their computers."

The atmosphere one morning was interrupted only when one of the tax accountants exchanged nods and a few words with the manager, who then spoke to another accountant before she returned to her office.

"The room, once again, was filled with only the noise of the clicking of keys on the computer keyboard or calculator," the report said.

But accountants contacted by AFP said there are good reasons for the way they do things.

"A lot of organizations have a template and a standardized format for letters. It's natural because what you do is routine. For efficiency, you have templates for things," said Tim Lui, a tax partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Hong Kong.

"It's like a doctor. Does he say `influenza' or a `common cold'? We wouldn't call them jargon. A lot of these things are legal terms used by the government too. They are not jargon. It's not something we reinvented," Lui said.

Another accountant, surnamed Hui, denied that accountants lack creativity and said jargon serves a purpose.

"That is the most efficient way to communicate. This is our own language," Hui said.
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