Say what you want about accountants but new research dating back to Sumerian times (that's around 7500 BC) suggests that beancounters laid the foundations for civilisation by enabling the development of a more complex economic society. Even language.

"There's been only three times in the history of man that written language has been invented," said one of the researchers, Professor Gregory Waymire. "Everything else has just sort of borrowed off of that." And in each case, he says, the first use of this tool seems to have been to do accounting: "It wasn't to write plays, it was to keep records."

In a piece from the Knowledge @Emory series, the researchers explain that in every early known civilization, transactional records seem to have gone head to head with the emergence of complex social arrangements.

But then, that would also suggest that fraud is as old as accounting itself. Which means no regulatory system will ever stop it. The frauds will always be with us.