Reviews the book "Basic Accounting," part II, by Homer St. Clair and Edward J. Koestler.

Reviews the book "Corporation Accounting," by Homer St. Clair Pace and Edward J. Koestler.

The article focuses on management thinking concerning corporate annual reports. An act of communication can be separated into five steps. The scientific study of any communication process tends to emphasize one or another of these five analyses. This article deals with the concepts, philosophy and thoughts guiding the 'who' or communicator of the annual report-top management. The purpose of this survey is to acquaint interested readers with top management thinking concerning annual reports of corporations. By so doing, a better understanding of management's problems will be developed by those people to whom top managements communicate. Such an understanding should provide more effective communication in annual reports. Better communication by those responsible, like controller, financial vice-presidents and presidents will help to solve some of the problems confronting our economy by supplying information to stockholders, creditors, employees, governmental agencies and the general public. These are the people who use the annual report.

Machine methods, the key to office automation, have developed impressively ever since the invention of the adding machine in the 1880's. Soon afterwards appeared the desk calculators. These milestones of machine method have progressively increased the areas of "automated" office operations. They have thereby progressively narrowed the need for the pencil and paper, the elemental tools of the accountant. As savers of human energy and time, all devices for mechanizing office tasks possess the same attributes, and the differences between them are relative only, important as the differences are. All of the known devices will continue to be useful, for the situations in the modern office in which machine methods are needed are as varied as they are vast. No doubt the future will see a more frequent reassessment of the functional usefulness of a particular machine in use to see if its versatility, speed and capability enable it to perform a task as economically as some other machine available in the market.

Reviews three books. "Canadian Master Tax Guide," 10th ed.; "Canadian Income Tax Act," 21st ed.; "Canadian Income Tax Regulations."

This article focuses on the broad versus narrow concepts of internal auditing and internal control. The expansion of business and the introduction of the corporate form of business organization long ago forced the separation of the investor from management. This divorce of investors from management, together with the demands of creditors, led to the development of periodic audits by independent outside public accountants. This same expansion of business with the resultant departmentalization and specialization by operation and by function, has also led to a widening gap between management itself and the operating units of the business. The subject of "Internal Auditing and Internal Control" supplies with a broad base from which to operate in our discussion here today. Perhaps some brief definitions of terms will be helpful to the purposes. It seems that there are two somewhat different concepts of internal control which should be recognized in discussions. The narrower of these two concepts appears in the definition of the term in auditing texts.

Reviews the book "The Ownership of Tax Exempt Securities 1913-1953," by George E. Lent.

This article focuses on problems in experimenting with the application of statistical techniques in auditing. In the first section of an article "Inadequacy of Some Experiments in the Past," published in the 1954 issue of the journal "Accounting Review," certain sample checks have been listed. The comment is that the reason for their lack of significance is that the experiments do not establish the relevance to the purpose of the audit, etc. This approach of working with an isolated phase of an audit was probably followed because it is much simpler than an attempt to tackle the audit as a whole. These statements indicate a misunderstanding of what was actually done. In the case of the a report the audit as a whole for the municipality was well established over a period of ten years before the case studies were begun. The purpose behind the report was to indicate how cases do occur during an audit where samples as a basis for judgment are both adequate and efficient. A report of this character should clarify something relative to the use of statistical methods in auditing.

Reviews the book "Examination of Insurance Companies," vol. 3 and vol. 4, edited by Adelbert G. Straub.