The article presents information on some problems of labor union auditing. Organized labor has traditionally regarded criticism of its financial machinery as an attempt on the part of employer groups to weaken its influence and bargaining power. The unions believe that much of the criticism has not been of a constructive nature and has emanated from those whose economic interests were, prior to the present war emergency and the resultant cooperation between labor and management, opposed to their own. Along with this has gone a hesitancy to engage independent auditors who, because their work is closely connected with business enterprises, have been associated in the thinking of labor union members with employers who may have done everything in their power to discourage or destroy organization among their employees. Many unions that engage independent public accountants require that audits be made monthly. In some cases the audits are made by a board of trustees selected by the union membership at regular elections or by special auditing committees elected each time an audit is required.

I. Conditions under which taxation is income creating, 265. — Influence of expenditures, 268. — II. Under-employment equilibrium with consumption 100 per cent of income, 269. — III. Under-employment equilibrium with net investment and the average propensity to consume less than 100 per cent, 275. — IV. Full employment and a sudden closing of investment outlets, 280. — V. Application of the foregoing analysis in a practical program, 285. — Effectiveness of the income tax as an instrument of policy, 286.

Scope of the paper: effects of a non-progressive balanced increase in the budget, 78. — The mechanics, 79. — Qualifications: character of government output, 82; competition with private enterprise, 83; effect upon the propensity to consume, 83; further effects of taxation, 85. — Comparison of income-generating measures, 88.

In three recent issues of the periodical "Accounting Reviews" dated October, 1943, January and July, 1944, representative educational programs of accounting majors have been printed for sixty colleges in the U.S. and for two in Canada. It is the purpose of this article to analyse the data thus collected. The first analysis, will deal with the quantitative aspects of the programs. This will classify the courses according to the usual departments of instruction and thus indicate the fields of education which receive particular attention in most programs in the sample. A subsequent analysis will deal with course names in order to derive further indications of the educational pattern of college students who major in accounting. Public accountants and others who give employment to college graduates with a major in accounting may find these representative programs helpful. They are individual programs, each representing the work of an actual student who was graduated from the school named. They can be studied individually as one deals in the office with one man at a time.

It is not unusual for accounting teachers to stress knowledge as an important aspect of preparation for a career in professional accounting. And it is perhaps understandable that sometimes they may not show full appreciation of the existence of other factors besides technical competence. Accounting practitioners, on the other hand, often emphasize the fact that qualities other than technical competence contribute greatly to successful professional service. Perhaps they sometimes give the impression that personal factors are more important than technical preparation. In one occupation rating scale constructed from data supplied by twenty industrial and vocational psychologists, occupations of university professor, oculist, civil engineer, journalist are classified in the first category of high abstract intelligence. But no mention is made there of the certified public accountant (CPA) or his counterpart in industry, the controller. It is not necessary to assert that a CPA is the intellectual equal of an oculist, a journalist, an engineer, or a professor, in order to point out that there may be a real question here concerning the adequacy of sampling which omits an important occupation.

The article discusses the advisability of discarding a fixed asset which can still be used and which may still be capable of earning profits and substituting for it a newer model. The author further states the fact that depreciation and obsolescence are sometimes treated as separate problems. If it is no longer wise to use an asset because new methods produce greater profits, then that asset has only a scrap value, it may have depreciated in use or it may have been used hardly at all, but it is obsolete, and must be written off. An asset is obsolete if the prime costs of using it are greater than the total costs of equivalent production using a new asset in its place. Businessmen may hesitate before scrapping an asset because it has become obsolete in the sense in which the word is defined above. Conditions may change and, unless the margin of benefit is considerable, it will be advisable to wait until the benefit appears to be permanent. In competitive industries, a failure to scrap old equipment may lead to heavy loss because a lower selling price will soon be fixed, based on the costs of production by the new method.

The usefulness to teachers of results of aptitude tests given to their students may easily prove greater than might at first be expected. If a school must limit its enrollment, objective measurements of learning capacity would be a helpful addition to the evidence afforded by previous classroom grades. There are several reasons for thinking that teachers of accounting and colleges of commerce generally should be glad to cooperate in this experiment wherever it is feasible to do so. If the accountant needs a certain type of ability, but little or no mathematical knowledge, it is an open question whether the study of mathematics is the best way to attain that ability. If some other approach will develop the desired ability and at the same time give the student certain knowledge that will also be directly useful in his future work, it is clearly an advantage to follow this course, even if to do so means foregoing the discipline which is part of the study of mathematics.

Reviews two books on trade. "Quantitative Trade Controls: Their Causes and Nature," by Gottfried Haberler and Martin Hill; "Trade Relations Between Free-Market and Controlled Economies," by Jacob Viner.

Reviews the book "Square Pegs in Square Holes," by Margaret E. Broadley.