Presents a reply to a comments made on the article "The Need for and Scope of the Audit of Management: A Survey of Attitudes," which was published in the April 1972 issue of the journal "The Accounting Review." Lack of understanding on the objective of the survey; Difficulty in implementing an audit of management; Involvement of a subjective judgment in any internal control evaluation.
This article presents information on audit management. The audit of management has received increasing attention in recent year. If the need for such an audit gains widespread support, the public accounting profession will face yet another challenge and a number of problems will require solution through the collective efforts of the public accounting profession, management and professional analysts. Justification for the audit could also be argued on the basis of the importance of management as a resource. American business attributes much of its success to its vast reservoir of professional managers, and is quick to identify the lack thereof as one of the barriers to success in other countries. If management is such an important resource and if it is in the interests of stockholders and the rest of society for that matter, that a particular business organization survive and grow, then it seems reasonable to conclude that these interested parties would be as interested in information concerning "management condition" as in financial condition and other indicators of ability to survive and grow.
The California One-Variety Cotton Law is an important example of technological regulation, in this case intended to serve as a de facto quality control and to mitigate externalities in production that can arise from the mixing of cottonseed at the gin. This paper describes and interprets the economic history of the law, presents a theoretical model of its economic effects, and provides quantitative estimates of the impacts on output, prices, and economic welfare, following a partial deregulation under a 1978 amendment to the law. The analysis shows that large social costs have arisen from concentrating control over the genetic base for California cotton production in the hands of a single government cotton breeder and restricting production to the use of a single selection of a single variety. Some of these costs have been eliminated by the partial deregulation in 1978 to permit private breeders to compete in the provision of genetic material, but production is still restricted to the Acala variety of cotton. While the regulation has benefited some, perhaps even a majority, of the industry participants, it has been increasingly harmful to some other growers and costly overall. The persistence of this costly regulation may be due to the distribution of its impacts: the partial deregulation yielded large increases in aggregate producer surplus but many growers experienced small losses.