Let's Talk About "Plagiarism" In Public Accounting

Before you get upset, hear me out. Plagiarism can be defined as taking someone else’s work and using it as for your own purposes. In public accounting, there is often times where someone else has already done work in a similar situation that can be leveraged to save time and effort, and being able to save time and effort is certainly a good thing in that context.

When you're in school, one of the worst things you can do is plagiarize another person's work. Academia tends to focus on academic honesty and ensuring that you are truly developing yourself, learning the material, and submitting work that reflects that. Once you move out into the professional world, things can change a little bit. The objective goes from "submitting a paper to show how smart you are" to "getting the job done in accordance with the relevant quality control standards."  This shift in perspective is the main focus of what we're talking about today.

Why can it be okay?

When you're in school and you need to create a project for class, that project primarily serves as the demonstration of your acquired knowledge and abilities. If someone else created your project, then you really didn't put in the work to acquire that knowledge. However, there are many times in the professional world where the objective isn't to demonstrate your knowledge (although it may be required as a component), but instead it's to get a job done for the client or for your boss. This means that using templates to solve problems or taking a technical Memo from another client's file and modifying it to work in your current client file is a good thing because it saves time and effort.

Alright, then how do I do it effectively?

Before you can start taking other people's work and utilizing it effectively, you need to understand your situation. If you take the wrong template or the wrong memo and start with it without understanding what you're using or what you need to use it for, you're going to end up with a bad result. Here are some ideas on how you can utilize other work:

  • If one or more clients have a similar technical requirement that can be templated

    • Deferred rent

    • Cash to accrual conversions

    • Work paper templates for standard procedures

  • You need to write a technical memorandum for clients with similar situations

    • One client might have a technical memo already written for a certain type of stock option plan that you can use on your new client

The key thing to remember here is that plagiarizing and public accounting is only good when you know what you're doing. In order to do it effectively you need to understand both what you're doing right now and what other jobs have done that can be applied in your new situation. If you don't understand what's going on, you're going to look like the kid trying to fit the square peg in the round hole. Ironically, to be good at plagiarizing (using your resources and others work) in public accounting, you need to have enough knowledge to know what to look for first, which means you probably didn't plagiarize in school. Using resources in this way is a skill that you should develop as a professional because it can save you hours of work and your managers hours of review.