Accountability is important, because without it, there's no where to place the blame when mistakes occur. In fact, accountability covers more than just blameworthiness; responsibility, answerability, and liability also come into question when discussing the importance of accountability. The very application of the word, describes a system, in which actions, decisions, and policies are all accounted for (or: kept track of, recorded, and assessed and evaluated). Accountability can even extend into the administration of new policies, that are rendered due to obsolete rules and regulations or just out-right compliancy issues; the governance of decisions that define expectations or verify one's performance-- as well as managing and guiding …show more content…

The definition of the word Accountability and its root word and synonyms should be clear now, but the derivitive is also significant. The word "Accountant" is derived from the French word Compter, which took its origin from the Latin word Computare. The word was formerly written in English as "Accomptant", but in the process of time the word, which was always pronounced by dropping the "p", became gradually changed both in pronunciation and in orthography to its present form. "Accountability" stems from late Latin accomptare (to account), a prefixed form of computare (to calculate), which in turn derived from putare (to reckon). While the word itself does not appear in English until its use in 13th century Norman England, the concept of account-giving has ancient roots in record keeping activities related to governance and money-lending systems that first developed in Ancient Israel, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, and later, Rome. If anything, accountants are like human computers, by definition at least; there is no better example, I think, than marine corps disbursing agents. They are the military version of accountants. Think of the them as portable PX's or Banks. They take your needs into account and they make disbursements (payments) to you. All of the traits/characteristics of the word "accountability," also help to serve the Marine. How? It takes honor to be able to take accountability, because you need the Integrity to follow your ethics and be