Fraud and incompetence:Accounting in the Papal States (1831–1859)

Abstract

The Papal States was a longstanding nation ruled by the Pope, the Head of the Roman Catholic Church. Its accountants included priests and laymen who were employed as bureaucrats. Despite an expectation that the finances would be carefully managed, this research from the mid-nineteenth century shows that incompetence and fraud dogged the Papal States’ latter years, contributing to it losing most of its territory in the Second War of Italian Independence from 1859, and its final demise in 1870. This prosopography of three men who held high bureaucratic positions, analyses their approach to accounting in the Papal States. It shows that waste and deficient accounting arose from individuals undertaking fraud and from organisational (and individual) incompetence. In doing so, it elucidates how the Papal States could be a ‘vehicle for fraud’, and in particular, how it was used as a shield to enable both fraud and incompetence to go unpunished.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/10323732211003685
Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Business School > Accounting
Additional Information: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Uncontrolled Keywords: Papal State,accounting fraud,incompetence,nineteenth century,prosopography,Accounting,History
Publication ISSN: 1032-3732
Last Modified: 19 Mar 2024 08:22
Date Deposited: 04 Jan 2021 15:10
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
https://journal ... 323732211003685 (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2021-11-01
Published Online Date: 2021-05-27
Accepted Date: 2021-01-04
Authors: Antonelli, Valerio
Coronella, Stefano
Cordery, Carolyn J. (ORCID Profile 0000-0001-9511-7671)
Verona, Roberto

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