The Advices of Accountant and the Precauti ons Taken in State Accounting During the Economic Crisis in the XVII Century Ottoman Empire

Year 2017, Issue: 12 - Issue: 12, 87 - 119, 01.01.2017

Recep Karabulut Can Tansel Kaya Bilal Solak

Abstract

Income and expenditure balance of the Ottoman State has deteriorated and the State had begun experiencing financial crisis depending upon the reasons such as long wars at 17th century and failure to use the silk road (Tekir,1989; Varcan & Çakır, 2000; Uzunçarşılı, B-1988). In order to find a solution to this position, the Ottoman State had applied also to the accountants and got their advice. Then it is seen that the by restructuring of the accounting organization, the State had started to take measures in order to increase revenues. (Tabakoğlu, 2005; Genç & Özvar, 2006)It is observed that the accountants’ recommendations stand on the reasons such as taking under the control of costs by reducing the number of civil servantsand soldiers (Danışman, 1971) and the emphasis on honesty and transparency or prevention of corruption etc.The re organization of the accounting departments were focused on bringing together according to subject matters not by geographic regions as usual in order to achieve this objective. Thus it was possible to get information about a business, not from a department of the dispersed geographical area, but from the collection of all the works department of business issues. It is also seen that the interim final accounts were prepared by adding the provisional estimate of three months to the first nine months’ actual results (Güvemli, 1998). Since accrual accounting should be applied in government accounting; referring to previous year, the expense account had to be removed as soon as possible at dizzy so that the amount of taxes were reported to the rate payers in that year. After these measures, it is observed that the expense account may be removed in the first month of the year with annual revenues of about data.It is also known that with the help of the measures on the revenue upward - the balance of income expenses could be created and confrontation with the state’s fiscal crisis was prevented during the 17th century’s first 75-80 years.

Keywords

17th century, Financial crisis in the Ottoman Empire, Accounting reorganization.