Dramatic changes have occurred in recent years in the corporate financial reporting environment. The volume and complexity of pronouncements by the various policymaking bodies have noticeably altered the character of and demands made upon financial accounting. Yet, there appears to be a general absence of any widely adopted innovation in the financial accounting curriculum. This paper examines one of the more commonly witnessed curricula for financial accounting and attempts to assess it in the context of its contribution to the intellectual and ethical development of the student. The paper goes on to propose an alternative curriculum, a restructuring of the pedagogy of financial accounting.

This article presents comments on the study "Environmental Complexity and Financial Reports," by Henry Miller. It discusses some of the experimental results evidenced by researchers testing the empirical correspondence of the theoretical work upon which Miller's extension was based. Miller introduces some new thoughts to the continuing debate on the relevancy of studies in decision making and environmental complexity to accounting research. However, the new dimensions that Miller adds are incomplete. Researcher Lawrence Revsine's original formulation of the problem in an accounting environment implied each member of the family of curves achieved optimal performance at the same level of complexity. The evidence cited in support of these relationships is the theoretical work by researcher O.J. Harvey and David Hunt. While the theoretical development of Harvey does indeed support the relationships depicted by Miller. Professor Miller has responded to the challenge with an interesting and provocative probe into the relevancy of one aspect of some of the behavioral studies of environmental complexity to a policy for expansion of the financial accounting data base, but the probe was, perhaps, not deep enough.