Lal Balkaran’s History of Accounting & Auditing in Guyana: Including the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Guyana, Other Agencies, and Some Coverage of the Caribbean, 1800–2024 is a pioneering work. For more than two centuries, accounting and auditing shaped the way Guyana’s businesses, plantations, and public institutions operated, yet until now no one had attempted to tell their story in a comprehensive way. This book fills that gap.
At over 330 pages, it traces the profession from the Dutch and British colonial systems of bookkeeping, through independence and the turbulence of the 1970s and 1980s, into the present oil-driven era. Balkaran recounts the dominance of expatriate accountants, the rise of firms such as Bookers, and the eventual emergence of Guyanese practitioners. He recalls the contribution of pioneers like A.M.S. Barcellos, the first Guyanese to qualify as an ACCA, and E.A. Adams, the first East Indian in Guyana to do so, alongside notables including Yesu Persaud, Willie Stoll and Jack Alli.
The book is strong in its treatment of institutions but also generous to individuals. Alongside detailed accounts of ministries, revenue authorities, and audit offices, Balkaran acknowledges the contributions of those who shaped the field. By recording their achievements, he preserves the personal dimension of the profession and ensures that such achievements are recorded for posterity.
Women too receive overdue attention. The book highlights the first women to qualify as chartered secretaries and accountants, and those who later broke through to senior professional roles and partnerships. By placing these achievements in a global context, he shows that Guyanese women were part of a wider struggle for recognition in male-dominated professions.
The book is also a valuable record of institutions: the Audit Office, the Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Guyana, the Guyana Revenue Authority, and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Guyana. Each is carefully chronicled with lists of officeholders, statutes, and milestones. More than fifty pages of appendices supply rare details, including reproductions of audit certificates and economic timelines. For researchers or students, these are priceless.
The strengths of the book are clear. It is comprehensive, patriotic in spirit, and diligent in the quality of painstaking research. What makes Balkaran’s achievement even more commendable is that he is a non-resident: yet his commitment to preserving Guyana’s professional heritage has not diminished. His prose is straightforward and accessible, making the book useful not only to accountants but also to historians and the wider readership.
The book is primarily descriptive rather than analytical, cataloguing institutions and events without probing their deeper significance. Critical questions remain unexplored: How did accounting maintain colonial inequality? The contribution of the Bookers Cadet Scheme to the surge in the profession in the middle years of the last century. How did the exodus of outstanding accountants like “Sammy” Singh, Sugrim Mohan, Ossie Baptiste, Alan Luck and Hamil Majeed impact the profession locally? The extent, if any, to which audit quality was compromised under state ownership? Should the profession engage in emerging issues like oil and gas accounting, sovereign wealth funds and public sector accounting?
These are questions and issues the book leaves for others to explore. The promised Caribbean coverage is also uneven, with Jamaica and Trinidad receiving more attention than smaller territories.
Still, these limitations should not overshadow the significance of this rare achievement. By laying such a foundation, Balkaran has provided the raw material for future scholarship and public debate. His book secures the profession’s past for posterity while opening the space for critical engagement with its present and future. Indeed, this initiative is worthy of emulation in medicine, law and other professions.
In the end, History of Accounting & Auditing in Guyana is more than a professional chronicle. It is part of the national story, reminding us that behind every balance sheet lies a history of people, institutions, and ideas. For that reason, it deserves a place not only on the shelves of accountants, but in the libraries of all who care about Guyana’s past and future.