Account
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Summary
An account is the open performance of answerability: conduct, reasons, records, acknowledgment, response, correction, and contest through which an addressee remains answerable to the holder of a directed claim. It is owed because a claim ground relates this holder to this addressee, not because every effect generates a universal duty to explain.
An account is neither authorization nor Settlement. It does not supply prior permission, and the party who owes it cannot convert its availability or performance into the holder's release, acceptance, or acquittal. Performing an account can satisfy the duties of account, and reasons can justify conduct; neither fact by itself certifies the holder's verdict or erases the residue of a claim that remains unsatisfied.
Form
Five features mark an account.
Address
It is owed to the claim holder, not merely produced about them or delivered to a supervisor, audience, court, or public.
Conduct before speech
Due care, truthfulness, preservation of options, response capacity, and protection of later assessment can be parts of the account before reasons are exchanged. What is required depends on the claim's ground and content.
Record
Where later review is possible or the affected holder cannot presently contest, preserving evidence can be part of what is owed. Concealment can defeat an account even where the actor could state reasons in the abstract.
Contest
An account remains exposed to challenge through a route capable of changing conduct, interpretation, or remedy. A statement made to an audience controlled by its author is not answerability merely because it is public.
Non-closure
The addressee cannot certify the holder's acceptance. Reasons may justify conduct without dissolving an unsatisfied claim or claiming that the matter is settled for its holder.
Ground and content
The account is a form, not an independent ground of obligation. Claim Grounds determines why an account is owed and supplies its initial content. An initiator may owe care and truthful history; a holder of power may owe exit, contest, and welfare limits; the recipient of a performed exercise may owe compliance within its scope; a wrongdoer may owe repair.
Different grounds can address the same party at once. Their account duties accumulate unless one claim validly changes another. A generic explanation cannot substitute for this ground-specific structure: we considered everyone does not say which claim was recognized, what it required, or why it remained unsatisfied.
What an account is not
- Not a grant: authorization requires the holder's performed exercise.
- Not acceptance: the holder need not endorse the reasons for them to be assessable.
- Not acquittal: adequate reasons do not erase residue or prohibit later contest.
- Not a procedure: records and review can perform answerability, but compliance with a checklist cannot replace the holder.
- Not a self-account: a narrative of the actor's virtue, sacrifice, or purity answers nothing unless it remains directed to the claim at issue.
A blended lot
Case: A grain cooperative stores members' lots in shared bins. When a bin's aeration fan fails overnight, manager M blends P's separately contracted identity-preserved lot into the commodity pool to save the remaining volume, destroying P's premium. M tells P within the hour, preserves the sensor traces and the note recording the decision, brings the choice before a member-elected review board with authority to order compensation, and pays the price difference. That M owes P an account on an established claim ground, and that M's reasons meet the separate conditions at Adequate Justification, are stipulated rather than argued. M then informs P that the matter is closed and further objection out of order. In a variant, M gives the same explanation to the board and in the members' newsletter, never addresses P, and discards the traces before any review.
Verdict: In the first version M performs what the account requires: it runs to P, part of it is conduct rather than explanation, it preserves what later assessment would need, and it stands exposed to a route that could change the outcome. That performance is not P's release, acceptance, or acquittal. P's claim remains unsatisfied in the respect the payment does not reach, and P may contest further. M's declaration of closure is not a further part of the account, since the addressee cannot certify the holder's acceptance. The variant fails earlier: an explanation delivered to a board and a newsletter is not an account owed to P, and discarding the traces removes what the available review would have had to assess.
Machinery: Address is why the report to P, and not the newsletter item, is the thing that could be an account at all. Conduct before speech and Record place M's prompt truthful notice and the preserved traces inside the account rather than before it, since later review remained possible. Contest is why a board able to order compensation and revise the rule matters and an audience the author controls does not. Non-closure separates performance from acceptance.
Cost: The verdict is not a finding for P. An account that stays open gives P no entitlement P did not already hold on the ground, and non-closure is not evidence that M's reasons fail — the case stipulated their adequacy rather than establishing it. It does not establish what M owes beyond the payment, or whether M's declaration of closure amounts to Settlement, which turns on that page's conditions.
Limits
- Adequate Justification distinguishes a justification's availability from the performance of the account duties defined here.
- The account duties attached to responsiveness and institutional holding extend the source concept through the reconstructed claim grounds; those extensions retain the registers stated there.
- Direct accounts to the dead remain unresolved where no performed exercise or living claimant supplies the relation.