The article focuses on a new design for the intermediate accounting course. One who sets out to review financial accounting textbooks will likely conclude that accounting educators are in virtually unanimous agreement on the manner, in which accounting information should be organized, classified and sequenced for delivery to students. Not only do all major intermediate accounting texts adopt virtually identical plans of organization, but also that plan is the same as that used in most introductory texts. The plan, well known to accounting educators, is that after initial chapters devoted to general aspects of the balance sheet and income statement, the text proceeds to have chapters on each of the major balance sheet and income statement accounts, that is, the chapter titles read like the financial statements themselves: cash, accounts receivable, inventories, fixed assets, current liabilities and so on. The similarity of organization in introductory and intermediate texts gives students the impression that intermediate accounting is just principles a little deeper.

This article discusses the nature of the assessment activity for audit decision making with citing an overview of some relevant research and some supporting evidence on the topic. The purpose of this article is to give additional exposure to a method of assessing prior probability distributions that appears to be particularly congruent with the auditor's environment. The process of quantifying qualitative evidence appears in the literature under a variety of terms, including "eliciting Bayesian priors" and "probability encoding." In this article, the process is referred to as "assessing prior probabilities or subjective probability distributions (SPDs)." According to the author, a satisfactory assessment of the prior probability function would result when the auditor, after training, believes that the resulting distribution is a good summary of his or her qualitative evidence. In a recently conducted study, all of the auditors had some difficulty in deciding where the first and third quartiles of the SPD ought to be in using the direct assessment method. There is some evidence that training in assessing SPDs may be an effective means of overcoming a common problem, that is, a possible tendency to underestimate dispersion. Results of that study indicate that even limited training may have an effect and that at least some auditors are receptive to the study and use of subjective probability distributions and Bayes method.

Reviews the books "Management Accounting: Text and Cases" 5th ed. and "Management Accounting Principles," 3rd ed., by Robert N. Anthony and James S. Reece.

Reviews the book "More Debits Than Credits: The Burnt Investor's Guide to Financial Statements," by Abraham J. Briloff.

Reviews the book "Certified Public Accounting: A Sociologist View of a Profession in Change," by Paul D. Montagna.

This article presents response of the author on comments made by scholars Jack Hayya, William Ferrara, and Erwin Saniga on the paper "Extending the Applicability of Probabilistic Management Planning and Control Models" that was published in the January 1974 issue of the periodical "The Accounting Review." One of the main points in the comment seems to revolve around the contention that recent advances in nonparametric statistical tests and the corresponding computer routines have made obsolete the use of Tchebycheff-type inequalities in probabilistic models. There are at least two possible reference points for defining the term obsolete. First, the term can be defined by referencing to the current level of technological feasibility, that is, what does one knows about the problems and techniques under consideration from a purely technological standpoint. Hayya and others are correct in stating that great advances have been made in the area of nonparametric statistics and the related computer routines. These advances have extended the technological feasibility of applying probabilistic planning and control models.

Presents a commentary to the article by Yuji Ijiri and Hiroyuki Itami which used a quadratic cost curve in developing the concept of an information delay loss which they measure as the difference between production costs when information is received early and those incurred when information is received late. Assumption required to point out information delay loss as calculated in the study; How the models of the study were developed; Implications for the information delay loss.

Presents a letter to the editor about price-level restated accounting and the measurement of inflation gains and losses.

The purpose of this article is to provide evidence on the value of government regulation of accounting reports. The banking industry was initially exempt from the disclosure provisions of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, because the U.S. Congress apparently felt that the banking industry was already regulated. In 1964, the Securities Acts were amended to require specifically that the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve Bank, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation regulate bank financial reporting. To test whether or not the informational content of state bank financial statements increased after the regulations, some surrogate for information must be used, because information itself is not directly measurable. Changes in security prices are commonly used as a proxy for information because stock prices represent weighted averages of investor expectations. The test based on the stable symmetric distribution and the non-parametric test both indicate that the announcement of bank financial data is associated with unexpected price movements which is consistent with the belief that financial statements contain information that investors act on.

Reviews the book "The Accounting Profession," by John W. Buckley and Marlene H. Buckley.