Here are parts 1 (my intro) and 2 (Letter #109). Now, without further ado, let’s proceed to the next piece of official customs-house correspondence in my Smithian sample: Letter #112, which is dated __ October 1784 (alas, the day is cut out of my copy of the letter) and is signed by three members of the Board of Customs of Scotland: Adam Smith (top signature), Basil Cochrane (middle), and James Edgar (bottom). This letter is short and sweet, for it reads as follows:
“It appearing by a List of Balances at the 5th. Ultimo laid before us by the Compt. General, that there is sufficient Money in the Collector’s hands, he is forthwith to remit the sum of Four hundred Pounds to the Receiver General, or to assign his reasons for not complying with this order.”
In other words, after taking notice of a recent financial statement (“List of Balances”) prepared by the board’s chief financial accounting officer (“the Compt. General”), the board (here composed of Smith, Cochrane, and Edgar) orders a local port collector to remit £400 (over £77,000 in today’s money; see here) to the main customs office in Edinburgh. This order thus refers to three different customs officials in all:
- The “Compt[roller] General”, i.e. the chief financial accounting officer and auditor of accounts who prepared the List of Balances referred to above;
- A local or regional port official (“the Collector[]”), whose job it was to collect duties, manage local officers, and seize smuggled or illegal goods; and
- The “Receiver General”, the treasurer or chief cashier for the central customs office in Edinburgh.
This letter also poses two questions in my mind. One is administrative: why couldn’t the Comptroller General himself directly order the local port official to remit the 400 pounds? That is, why did the Comptroller have to go through the Board of Customs to make this request? The other question is specific to Adam Smith: how much time did he spend reviewing the List of Balances prepared by the Comptroller General, or was he able to delegate this tedious task to an underling?
Either way, this little letter illustrates the strict separation of duties between the accounting, book-keeping, and audit functions of the Comptroller General on the one hand and the actual handling of cash by the Receiver General and the local port collectors on the other, a sophisticated system of financial checks and balances designed to prevent fraud and corruption in the customs bureaucracy. (See generally Elizabeth E. Hoon, The Organization of the English Customs System, 1696-1786. Reprint ed.: A. M. Kelley (1968), available here.)
