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A while back, I talked about some secondary press on "The Licensing Racket". In that book, the author talked about just showing up to board meetings for various licensing boards and just watching what they do. Her takeaway was that when it came to disciplining bad behavior of their members, it was supreme leniency, but when it came to any sniff of an unlicensed person doing anything, it was knives out. High crimes. Treason.
At that point, I was mostly just taking her account as an account. It certainly seemed plausible, but of course, she may have been motivated to exaggerate things for an agenda or just to sell more books or something.
But someone on the HVAC subreddit just linked to this. It's from North Carolina's board for plumbing, heating, and fire sprinklers. Looks like they publish one of these newsletters every couple months. Front page is the most important bit - PAY YOUR MONEY TO RENEW YOUR LICENSE! Then some information about the board and forms. Finally, the bulk of the newsletter is reporting their disciplinary stuff.
It's all right there. In black and white. From their own pen. You can just read through it and see. The majority of items (~60%) were them going after unlicensed folks. Near as I can tell, in almost all of the examples of discipline against their own, licensed folks, the result was "probation" and maybe taking a class (almost certainly paying the board to take said class). I think the only examples of anything more significant than that were cases where a licensee did something, how shall I phrase it, 'against the integrity of the licensing scheme'? Like, they let someone else use their license number, for example. That's a real crime that will get your license revoked.
Whereas they seem to have quite the scheme for going after unlicensed folks. They may get someone to sign a "consent agreement", promising not to do any unlicensed work. Or they might take it to a court, potentially getting real, big boy penalties. Did you know that they can get you put in jail for 30 days and slap you with a $5,000 fine? I learned that.
They publish this! You don't have to go to their meetings to find out! You don't have to believe what some random author said about them! They just tell you!
Such incentives made accounting stagnate and be all about compliance with precious little insightful metrology. If you really think about operations and valuations, you can easily beat the market (but "non-GAAP" is mostly bs). To practice accounting at work, you must be licensed; if you are the end user, you can do plenty of "illegal" and useful things.
Could you share some examples?
When practicing accountants cook the books, they're embezzling or misrepresenting the company's operations. The professionalized field emerged to protect investors from false data. Presuming this works and public data is real, we may wonder if this data is also useful. A few basic valuation practices which violate regulations:
Some of this might seem tame, but accepted metrics like COGS leave a lot of alpha on the table because of various violations, which e.g. make illegal some methods to compare companies at different parts of the same industry (e.g. midstream and upstream companies) which help you gauge the cycle.
Similarly, in my system of national accounts, "government spending" is not included in the net material product, a term inspired by the Soviet style which excludes most services and nets out capital depreciation. I use this to forecast growth and market expansion. It's also really import to even out imputed values. From 3% in 1985, now 10% of US GDP is arbitrary imputed rent while e.g. China takes construction cost and depreciates it at 2% per year. This means China's imputed rents on are 1/10 of Germany's for comparable housing, after purchasing power adjustments, when habitable area/person is only 42m^2 vs. 48m^2. In Japan, imputed rent went to 14%.
Now, I don't count "government spending", because monetized transfers like social security directly increase GDP, which is bad. But many governments pay for healthcare and tertiary education - those should be imputed for their real value. This is why I don't count services. After all, greater US healthcare output does not give Americans healthier lives than Italians or Singaporeans, higher European education attainment does not result in greater incomes than Americans; there are obvious confounders for all of this.
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