Career
Montgomery quit school at the age of 14 and went to work in order to help out his family. In 1889 he got a job as an office boy at an accounting firm in Philadelphia. There he learned accounting and was made partner after seven years. Two years later in 1898, Montgomery and three of his colleagues, William M. Lybrand, Adam A. Ross Jr. and his brother T. Edward Ross, formed Lybrand, Ross Brothers and Montgomery. Two years later the firm opened an office in New York City under Montgomery's management. In his spare time Montgomery learned law. He was admitted to the New York Bar in 1904. Montgomery established his own law firm, Robert H. Montgomery, Attorney at Law, and worked on many difficult tax cases for clients. In 1905 Montgomery led a reorganization of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). He created the Journal of Accountancy (then called the American Journal of Accounting). The first issue contained his Professional Standards. He was president of the AICPA for two two-year terms, first in 1912 and again in 1935.
Next, Montgomery also got into the field of education by developing a curriculum in accounting for Columbia University. He was hired as Columbia's first accounting professor in 1910 and stayed there until 1939.
Montgomery saw the need for a book on auditing. In 1912 he wrote Auditing: Theory and Practice. This was the first American book on auditing. For the seventh editions two other authors joined him and the book was retitled Montgomery's Auditing. After Montgomery's death the eighth edition was published in 1957 by two other authors. It is still in print and is now in its 12th edition.
Commissioned as a Lieutenant Colonel (1918) during World War I, he was generally referred to thereafter as Colonel Montgomery. He received the AICPA's Gold Medal Award in 1949. In 1950, he was inducted into the Accounting Hall of Fame, in the first year of that award.
Montgomery was a highly respected leader of the profession of accountancy for over 60 years. His influence is still felt in the areas of auditing theory and practice, federal income taxation, professional accounting organizations, and accounting education.
Read more about this topic: Robert Hiester Montgomery
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