Failure to set standards may succeed in postponing the day of reckoning, but not for long. Regulation of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission affecting corporate reports, no matter how wise may be the language in which they are couched, will cause the accountant many perturbations. The accountant will not be ready for them. The accountant will again consult his attorney. A committee of the American Institute of Accountants will protest mildly the Commission's unnecessarily harsh and untrustful attitude toward the profession. There will be a revival of talk to the effect that after all the old order was best, the securities act and the securities exchange act need drastic modification. But nobody will come forward with concrete suggestions as to the precise nature of the modification needed. And the failure to accept the public generally as a third party to every accounting engagement will continue for as long a time as possible. Lawyers and accountants will cry unrestrainedly on each other's shoulders. But regulations will be followed and thus a new era will dawn for the accountant, however weakly and fatuously he may resist its coming

Under the spell of rumored drastic regulations of the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, professional accountants are exhibiting a bad case of nerves. Many damage suits against leading firms of practitioners are already in courts and reports of more and larger suits are rife. Attorneys, preparing hastily conceived opinions and having insufficient knowledge of traditions and conventions of the profession, are emphasizing to its members terrors of the strike-suit racket. And, what is worse still in an emergency like the present, the almost universal dependence of accountants on the views of others offers convincing evidence that the profession is either unwilling or incapable of doing any straightforward thinking on its own behalf. To instructors in accounting, this condition of affairs should offer a challenge. Now, more than ever, the voice of enlightened opinion within the profession is needed. For years it has failed to see problems before it, problems for the complexity of which it alone has been responsible. Years of uninterrupted prosperity for large national firms, with the control of the profession as a natural by-product of their growth, have built up a complacency and sense of security which are now being rudely shaken

The article presents views of the author on novel business and accounting practices in Mexico. These novelties were very amusing and interesting to us and compared strangely with the way of doing things in the U.S. We in the U.S., are complaining about the various records, forms, which have to be kept for purposes of the Revenue, Securities and Securities and Exchange Acts. This complaint would become a mild one, indeed, if our corporations should be compelled to conform to the regulations now existing in Mexico. In the auditing of the cash account we encountered a strange procedure that is followed by the banks in that country. The banks do not return the canceled checks with the bank statement. The reason behind such practice is that the canceled check is the only evidence the bank has for the charge it has made to the company's account and therefore it keeps the check for its own protection. At first such a practice appeared amusing, but on second thought one can not deny that banks were following a safer policy in this respect than our own do. In the U.S. it would be an easy matter for a customer on receiving his canceled checks from the bank to abstract one and then claim that the bank had erred in charging his account for the amount of the check he had abstracted