Eli Mason, 88; accountant was a leader on ethics

Mr. Mason was a longtime defender of small and midsize accounting firms and a traditionalist in a profession that slowly came to be dominated by huge firms like Ernst & Young and Arthur Andersen.

David Gotterer, a business partner and friend for 56 years, and others said Mr. Mason’s passion earned him the nickname the “conscience of the profession.’’

“The big accounting firms had most of the big clients, but Eli always took the position that a good accountant is a good accountant no matter where he worked,’’ Gotterer said.

Mr. Mason was an early voice warning that firms offering consulting services as well as pure accounting oversight would erode the independence of corporate auditing.

In a career that spanned seven decades, Mr. Mason was not afraid to make his feelings known, said Bill Carlino, editor in chief of Accounting Today. Mr. Mason wrote regularly for the magazine in the last decade. His last article, in June, was about the growing complexity of shareholder reports.

“He argued tirelessly about accountability, and objectivity and independence in the profession,’’ Carlino said. “He rankled people and not everyone agreed with him, but people respected him because he was a purist.’’

Eli Mason was born in Manhattan and grew up on the Lower East Side. A lifelong resident of New York, he lived in the Peter Cooper Village housing complex for more than 50 years with his wife, Claire. Mr. Mason leaves Claire, along with their two daughters, Judy Berger and Nina Hirshfeld; and four grand- children.

Mr. Mason went to the business school of the City College of New York, where he studied accounting with Emanuel Saxe, a distinguished professor and one of the accounting world’s stars at the time. He graduated in 1940 and was a lifelong supporter of the college, now Baruch College of the City University of New York, where he endowed a chair for accounting in 1992 and financed the restoration of the school’s biggest auditorium, now called Mason Hall.

In 1946, he founded Mason & Co. His small practice specialized in representing people working in New York’s entertainment field, said Gotterer, who joined the firm in the mid-1950s.

The company, which eventually had about 35 accountants, merged with the J.H. Cohn firm in 2003.

In 1979, he helped found the National Conference of CPA Practitioners, which consisted of 1,500 small firms, and became one of the profession’s most vocal critics of the big accounting firms, then known as the Big Eight.

In particular he resented the practice he referred to as low-balling, or aggressively cutting prices, sometimes below cost, to attract new clients.

He also spoke against the industry’s mergers in the 1980s, which reduced the number of major firms to five, and he was critical of large firms that offered consulting services as well, fearing this would erode their independence from their clients.

Many of his fears turned out to be justified when the accounting scandals of Enron and WorldCom highlighted the cozy relationship between some of the world’s top accounting firms and the companies they were supposed to audit. Arthur Andersen was one, having been Enron’s accounting firm.