Accountability: The capacity and willingness to give explanations for conduct, stating how one has discharged one’s responsibilities, an explaining of conduct with a credible story of what happened, and a calculation and balancing of competing obligations, including moral ones.
Accountability is:
more total and insistent ... [it] ranges more freely over space and time, focusing as much on future potential as past accomplishment
Accounting provides an account – an explanation or report in financial terms – about the transactions of an organization. It enables managers to satisfy the stakeholders in the organization (owners, government, financiers, suppliers, customers, employees etc.) that they have acted in the best interests of stakeholders rather than themselves.
