During the past decade the organizations responsible for regulating the form and content of accounting disclosures have become increasingly active. As a result of this activity, the authoritative pronouncements in accounting have become increasingly technical and intricate in nature. This has caused a problem for accounting education: it has become very difficult to cover all, or even most, of the pronouncements within the standard accounting curriculum. This paper examines the approach adopted in law schools, where this problem has existed for some time. The basic approach, a blend of general-principles courses with applied research courses, is found to be adaptable to accounting education. Specifically, this paper recommends that accounting education should include applied accounting research techniques in its curricula to provide students with the means of dealing with a detailed and cumbersome body of authoritative literature. The paper also provides a suggested research design for conducting applied accounting research.

Accounting policy makers and taxation authorities have been concerned with the understatement of depreciation expense that can accompany the use of generally accepted depreciation procedures. In addressing this concern, the taxation authorities have adopted a new method of historical cost depreciation known as the Accelerated Cost Recovery System (ACRS). Accounting policy makers, on the other hand, have addressed the "underdepreciation" issue with an experimental program of current cost depreciation disclosure. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the depreciation charges associated with the ACRS and current cost depreciation systems. The results of the analysis show that, for a variety of growth and price change conditions, the ACRS and current cost procedures can provide similar depreciation charges. As such, the ACRS techniques can alleviate considerably the "underdepreciation" effects that have been associated with some of the traditional historical cost depreciation methods.

Discusses the report of the Committee on Accounting for Social Performance of the American Accounting Association which explored the state of social accounting in the United States in 1975. Analysis of the practices in accounting and the reporting of corporate social performance; Investigation of corporate charitable contributions; Issues concerning the place of social accounting in accounting education.