Abstract Buying for the government is subject to a vast aggregate of statutes, Executive and administrative orders, legal interpretations by the General Accounting Office, and court decisions. Some rules, such as those relating to standardized specifications, have their parallel in private business enterprises. Others have, but only if one forgets that a rule-making power vested in Congress and a separate administrative responsibility vested in a department head are likely to afford much less flexibility of rules than exists where not only administrative responsibility but also a generous measure of rule-making power are vested in a single manager. The contrast is all the greater if the business concern which the manager runs is not itself a body of such great size as to have the sort of complexity which characterizes governmental organization. Funds for procurement or for non-procurement purposes are usually made available in and for a single fiscal year. In the enforcement of the laws with which Federal procurement is hedged about, the General Accounting Office figures much more largely than the courts. Infractions of those laws usually are less classifiable as criminality than as inept or culpable administration, or as an admirably motivated if indiscreet effort to get a job done even at the cost of scissoring some red tape.

Abstract The fact that the complicated business of making war can be epitomized for certain purposes into a few guiding principles suggests that accounting also may rest upon certain leading ideas which we may call principles. The military strategist would not thumb through a pocket list to choose the principle to be applied next to his situation. Neither would an accountant. Principles probably serve their purpose best after their essence and their interrelations have been made so thoroughly a part of a man's thinking processes as to have been forgotten as verbal propositions. In times like these, generalizations about the science of making war are interesting for their own sake to laymen. But they can be of more than passing interest to accountants because they illustrate so well the useful art of generalization. About a year ago a compact summary of the principles of war was published, as of October 1943. The nine principles stated in the summary are briefly summarized in this article to give further emphasis on the factor of interdependence.

Abstract There has been considerable public criticism of what appeared to be unduly high costs for the administration of public assistance and relief. Administration expenses have generally been contrasted by legislators and the public with the cash payments made directly to public assistance beneficiaries. Grouping and contrasting expenditures for assistance, on the one hand, and administration, on the other, have encouraged the assumption that costs of administration represent merely the cost of distributing the money expended for assistance. Persons familiar with public assistance operations realize that other functions are also performed. They realize further that the cost incurred for investigating cases, which never receive relief, may be more in the interests of the taxpayer than haphazard and inappropriate disbursements to individuals not entitled to benefits under the public assistance program. The standard classification of public assistance costs is a joint recommendation of the American Public Welfare Association and the Social Security Board. Official participation by staff members of the Social Security Board made it possible to incorporate the thinking and recommendations of the experts concerned with national phases of public welfare administration and accounting.

Abstract Accounting is such a field, and, like other fields of knowledge and of work, it stands to benefit from a continuing exchange of views. The range of the exchange need not be confined to the results of extensive research, or to the analysis and reporting of complex experience. Exchange of opinions can also make a contribution. What one thinks at the moment need not commit him irrevocably to a certain position, nor is his idea necessarily put forward with the purpose of securing converts to the view presented. A good perspective on professional attributes would be helpful, for example, whenever the problem to be faced had to do with setting and maintaining standards of admission to the profession and standards of professional practice after admission. Good perspective would also be useful whenever organization activities or educational programs are under consideration. When and if the profession might be under fire of criticism, perspective would be indispensable. A number of tests could perhaps be devised and tried on experienced accountants in an experimental way. Those tests that seemed most revealing could then be subjected to further observation by using them experimentally with young men recently accepted for professional work and still under training and scrutiny, and by using them experimentally upon college students who wish to major in accountancy and may later be further observed in class and office.

Abstract The U.S. Federal Government uses both definite and indefinite-quantity contracts, the latter being known also as "term contracts" and "open-end contracts." An indefinite-quantity contract ordinarily is one by which the government promises that, during a stated period, a specified agency or group of agencies will buy certain specified commodities only from a particular supplier. The supplier promises that he will sell to the agency or agencies as little or as much as they wish to buy of those commodities during the period named. A minimum-quantity contract differs from an indefinite-quantity contract only in involving a commitment by the government as to the minimum amount that it will buy. The Procurement Division of the U.S. Treasury Department is the nearest approach which Federal procurement has to centralized buying. It effects or aids in a far smaller percentage of the War and Navy Departments' total purchases than of civilian agencies' total purchases, and at present is of course overshadowed, in importance as a buying agency, by each of the former two agencies' vastly increased procurement.

Abstract Reviews the book "Accounting Developments During the Present Century," by Walter A. Staub.