Rebuilding trust: the role of accounting in holding society together
In this article, Theresa Harrer, Assistant Professor at EDHEC, examines how accounting may contribute to the current crisis of trust in institutions, and why it may also be part of the solution.
Across the world, trust in institutions is on a shaky ground. Every few months a new headline announces that confidence in governments, corporations, or the media has slipped again. Gallup (1), for instance, reports that trust in core US institutions – like the Supreme Court or the presidency – is now at historic lows. Commentators in Forbes, El Pais, or the Financial Times warn that people no longer feel these institutions work for them.
Meanwhile, the Edelman Trust Barometer (2) calls this moment a “cycle of distrust,” where citizens doubt not just decisions, but the information those decisions are based on. Put simply: many people no longer believe the system has their back.
In this article, I explore how accounting – numbers, rankings, dashboards, and all the calculative work behind them – shapes this trust crisis. And why, surprisingly, accounting might be part of the solution.
Accounting: clarity for some, vulnerability for others?
Let’s start with trust itself.
Trust isn’t just a nice feeling; it’s a risk. It’s the moment you accept vulnerability because you expect someone (or something) to act competently and fairly. Denise Rousseau and colleagues put it nicely back in 1998 (3). They note that trust is choosing to be vulnerable under uncertainty.
And as my own work shows (4), we make these choices while juggling risks across different parts of life – work, family, friendships, even digital spaces. Our experiences in one world can spill into how we judge another.
Now here’s where accounting quietly enters the picture. Accounting makes things visible: a company’s climate exposure, a government’s debt, a city’s migration flows. It also makes things legible: whether a sustainability strategy actually aligns with a 1.5°C pathway, or whether a firm’s financial health passes muster. In doing so, accounting doesn’t just describe reality, it defines what counts as risky or responsible. It creates new exposures and shapes what people worry about. And because each of us carries our own mix of hopes and anxieties, the same disclosure can calm one person and unsettle another. A climate risk report, for example, might reassure an investor but worry a family living near rising seas.
That’s the thing about accounting: it may reduce vulnerability, but it may also produce it.
The “dark side” of accounting
When accounting works well, it builds trust. Standardised reporting cuts through ambiguity. Rules and oversight create a sense that everyone is playing by the same ground rules. Non-financial reporting widens our view of organisations’ social and environmental footprints.
Research shows that these formal mechanisms even replace the need for personal trust (5). You don’t need to meet a CEO to believe in the company if the systems around it work.
But recent events have shown how thin this trust can be. The UK Post Office scandal, for example, revealed how a flawed accounting system generated thousands of false accusations and ruined lives, all because people trusted the numbers more than the humans in front of them. The Wirecard collapse revealed enormous cracks in audit and regulatory oversight. COVID dashboards – datasets meant to inform and reassure – became lightning rods for disagreement and suspicion (6). And in sustainability reporting, ESG ratings and new regulatory frameworks promise transparency but often deliver confusion instead (7).
Scholars have a name for this: the dark side of accountability. Espeland and Sauder showed that university rankings led to fear and strategic behaviour rather than improvement (8). Michael Power warned years ago that our hunger for transparency might create an “audit society” (9) where constant measurement feels less like clarity and more like surveillance.
More accounting doesn’t automatically mean more trust. In fact, sometimes it does the opposite.
The role of individual emotions and circumstances
My own research adds a twist to this story (10). I find that trust usually breaks not when systems fail in a technical sense, but when they fail emotionally and socially. When people feel already stretched – financially, emotionally, socially – an audit that feels like box-ticking, a sustainability report that feels symbolic, or an automated control that flags them without explanation can trigger that familiar sense of “the system isn’t on my side”. In these moments, accounting doesn’t protect, it exposes. And when we feel exposed, trust can flip into suspicion and mistrust surprisingly quickly.
All of this means that trust crises don’t come only from faulty software or accounting scandals. They also come from systemic misalignment – when people feel that the very systems that are meant to reduce or protect their vulnerability aren’t tuned to what they actually value. If accounting infrastructures are meant to help society navigate uncertainty, they must feel meaningful and credible to the people who rely on them (11).
This is why accountants and accounting educators carry a unique responsibility. They design and maintain the systems that tell society what matters and how risk is distributed. At EDHEC, this is why we teach accounting – whether financial, cost-based, or sustainability-focused – not just as a technical skill but as a powerful social practice.
Because in many ways, numbers really are the “secret sauce” of trust. And right now, society desperately needs that sauce to hold everything together.
References
(1) https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-down-average-new-low.aspx
(3) https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/amr.1998.926617
(4) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21515581.2025.2553511
(5) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014829632100179X?via%3Dihub
(7) https://academic.oup.com/rof/article/26/6/1315/6590670
(8) https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/517897
(9) https://academic.oup.com/book/26482
(10) https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMPROC.2024.13245abstract
(11) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104523542400056X#s0025
Photo by Ronda Dorsey via Unsplash
