Reviews the book "Public Budgeting Systems," 2nd ed., by Robert D. Lee and Ronald Johnson.

Reviews the book "C.P.A. Law Review," 5th ed., by Joseph L. Frascona.

Reviews the book "Introduction to Modern Accounting," 3rd ed., by Ronald J. Thacker.

Reviews the book "European Financial Reporting 1: West Germany," by J.H. Beeny.

Relevant costing and incremental analysis are often-used decision-making tools. Irrelevant costs are excluded from any incremental decision-making problem because they are supposed to have equal effects on all the available alternatives. This paper demonstrates that when utility analysis is introduced, and when uncertainty exists, the "irrelevant" items may become relevant as the decision-maker's perspective shifts along his preference function. This phenomenon is especially true when large dollar "irrelevant" items prevail. The problem is further compounded when deciding the proper datum for the utility function and for the various costs and revenues.

Reviews the book "Modern Management Accounting," 1st ed., by A. Tom Nelson and Paul B.W. Miller.

Though demands to teach internal auditing have now been made for over a generation, at present, internal auditing as a university discipline is in a serious decline. Indeed, the roots of the debate on internal audit education were recorded in THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW in the 1950s, and much of what is being said now is a restatement of old arguments. The principal issue of debate has been whether internal auditing should be taught. Internal auditing is flourishing in one university. This article suggests a number of reasons for its success, and questions established assumptions about internal audit education.

Students sometimes have difficulty in fully understanding the implications and applications of behavioral concepts to accounting. A reason for this difficulty may be because these concepts are frequently presented, illustrated, and discussed in contexts that are unfamiliar to the student. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a general approach which may be used in discussing this topic in the classroom using illustrations and questions that may be both more understandable and meaningful to students in their college environment.

Reviews the book "Financial Reporting in Japan," by Robert J. Ballon, Iwao Tomita and Hajime Usami.

This article contains an experiment designed to assess the importance of two personality variables, tolerance for ambiguity and decision style, on a subject's information processing. Subjects who were classified as heterogeneous on personality variables made homogeneous decisions. Further, subjects who were classified as having homogeneous linear decision models had heterogeneous personality classifications. Thus, in this experiment as in several other experiments (which are cited in this paper), personality variables do not appear to be useful in describing, understanding, or predicting human information processing. Psychological literature was reviewed which reinforces the finding of this and other papers--that personality alone does not account for much of the variance in a decision maker's behavior. The literature reviewed indicated that to account for large portions of the variance in behavior, human information processing models might need to take into account not only the processor, but also (particularly) the task and the processor-task interaction.