Notes on CICA Data
CICA Directories
The Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA) publishes an annual
directory, the Directory of Canadian Chartered Accountants. The 1959 directory
is used for the year 1960, the 1970 directory for 1970, the 1981 directory for
1980, the 1985 directory for 1985, and the 1990 directory for 1990.
Each directory has two different lists: a list of members, and a geographical
list of firms of accountants and sole practitioners.
The list of members is an alphabetical list of certified accountants. In 1959
and 1970, the list is partitioned by province. In 1981, 1985, and 1990, all
accountants in Canada are listed together. Each entry includes a name, an
address, and a year of admission to a provincial institute. Some entries include
the name of the accountant's company, which is not always an accounting firm.
The accountant name is the accountant's full given name. The address is
usually, but not always, that of the firm under which the accountant appears
in the geographical list. The year of admission to other affiliations, if any,
is also given, but this information is not used. In 1959 and 1970, the year of
admission is the year in which the accountant becomes a member of the
provincial institute of current membership. In 1981, 1985, and 1990, the year
of admission is the first year in which the accountant becomes a member of
some provincial institute, not necessarily the one of current membership.
Unlike the geographical list, the list of members includes all accountants,
not just those working as a sole practitioner or for an accounting firm. Many
accountants work for firms that are not accounting firms, or for the government.
The geographical list is a list of accounting firms and sole practioners by
town. Towns are listed alphabetically, not partitioned by province. For each
town, firms of accountants and sole practioners are listed alphabetically by
name. Under each firm, surnames and initials of resident partners and pricipals
appear alphabetically. Note that the geographical list does not include non-accounting firms that employ accountants.
Year of Admission
The data tables give a single year for the year of admission. Note that the
definition of year of admission changes between 1970 and 1981. In the few cases
where the two years differ, the earlier definition is used.
Duplicate Accountants
In 1959 and 1970, about 25 of several hundred accountants appear under two or
more locations in the geographical list. In 1981 one accountant is listed twice,
and in 1985 and 1990, no accountant is listed more than once. I suspect that for
the three later years, the CICA insisted on a single listing for each member,
and that the double listing of an accountant in 1981 was a mistake. This matter
is not discussed in the directories. The data tables list a single location for
each accountant in each year. Where duplication exists, the accountant is listed
in the usual manner for the location given in the list of members. Duplicate
accountants are created for other locations. In the acct file (a table with data
for each accountant), one field is an indicator variable that marks these
duplicate accountants. In other files, fields representing quantities of
accountants include duplicates, and there is no way of telling how many. The
program which processes the CICA data and generates the data files can be easily
modified to generate files that exclude duplicates. With more difficulty, they
can be modified to generate two separate fields (one indicating numbers of
duplicates) for every such field. Accountants must have unique names, and the
names of duplicates are formed by appending a "!" (or two) to the beginning of
the surname.
Accountants with the Same Name and Initials
The program that processes the CICA data requires unique accountant names.
Otherwise it cannot reliably track accountants from year to year. No two
accountants can have both the same surname and the same initials. Of course, in
a list of a several thousand names, many pairs (and one triple) of accountants
do in fact have the same surname and initials. I edited the CICA data and
inserted extra initials to make the names unique. The extra initials are "1",
"2", and where necessary, "3", and cannot be confused with real initials.
Using only the geographical list, it is impossible to distinguish between
duplicate accountants and two different accountants with the same name and
initials. With the list of members, which gives full given names and locations,
it is easy.
Firms
Firms are not explicitly listed in the CICA directories. Two loc are deemed to
belong to a firm if they have exactly the same name, or are obviously related to
each other. The file aliases lists all of the latter
cases. Pairs of lines in this file are the names of two locs deemed to be part
of the same firm, despite different names.
Town Name Changes
Between 1959 and 1970, the towns of Port Arthur and Fort William combined to
become Thunder Bay. Between 1970 and 1981, the towns of Galt and Preston
combined to become Cambridge. In the years in which these towns were separate,
they have been aggregated, by changing the names of the separate towns to the
new names.
Changes and Corrections to Location and Accountant Names
Several mistakes in the CICA directories were corrected in the electronic
version.
In some cases, an accountant has more initials in one year than in another. In
these cases, initials were added to the shorter initials to make the strings of
initials identical. In other cases, the accountant has more initials in the
list of members than in the geographical list. In these cases, the extra
initials were added to the geographical list.
Geographical List of Accountants
Electronic versions of the geographical lists are found in these files:
1960.i
1970.i
1980.i
1985.i
1990.i
They differ from the original CICA versions in the following ways: They are in
lower case throughout. The changes discussed above were made. Dummy postal codes
were added to the 1960 list, to prevent the processing program mistaking an acct
name for an address. Page numbers (with a "." prefix, as in ".501") were added
to allow cross referencing. Common address words such as street and suite were
abbreviated to their first letter. The dummy acct name "aadummy" was added to
those locations under which no accts are listed. This is to allow the processing
program to distinguish these locations from sole practitioners. The dummy accts
are not included in the data files.
Assignment of Towns to Census Subdivisions
Using road maps and census boundary maps, towns were assigned to census
subdivisions (csds). A town is always within a single csd, but a csd may include
any number of towns. Typically a town is the only town in a csd, and has the
same name as the csd. The file csd90 is a complete list of
towns, and the csds they belong to in 1990. Towns appear by name, csds by cd
code and csd code. Some single csds in 1990 were formerly several csds. The
files csd85, csd70, and csd60 list assignments of towns to these small csds. The file
csd85 assigns towns to 1986 csds that are part of larger csds in the next census
(1991). And so on, by analogy.