Reviews the book "Organizational Decision Making," by Marcus Alexis and Charles Z. Wilson.

Reviews the book "Audits of Banks."

Abstract Providing purpose oriented information appears to become an important part of the accountant's function in the future. With the increasing utilization of the computer in carrying out many of his past functions, this role may even be crucial to the accountant's professional survival. However, before the accountant can fulfill this role, methods of drawing information of different types from the available financial data must be developed. This article has provided some basic research for attacking this problem through the removal of the traditional assumption of a fixed time dimension in accounting reports. It was found that when this assumption was relaxed, quite different information was provided by identical financial data. It is not the intention of this article to suggest that the traditional method of reporting financial data be superseded by an alternative method. The purpose of this article is rather an attempt to uncover new avenues for possible improvements in financial reporting by emphasizing the varied types of information available from financial data and by showing the ever present characteristic of quantitative information to portray certain relation- ships while concealing others.

Abstract The article outlines a statistical approach in cost measurement and control which can be easily implemented in practice. This approach will allow accountants to convert certain types of costs currently treated as overhead costs into traceable direct costs. The detailed cost measurements on individual inventory items provide "more information" than knowledge of only the total inventory cost. Cost accounting systems, often very elaborate cost accounting systems, are designed to detect and measure resource flows for both product and responsibility center costing. In general, however, detection and measurement costs increase as more detailed information on resource flows is desired. Accounting systems for this reason resort to collecting aggregated information. The aggregation itself may be over various types of activities, time intervals, or products. If one desires to study marginal costs, an examination of costs allocated to idle time will prove helpful. In summary, statistical cost finding is no panacea for accounting problems, it is rather a useful tool for developing information not usually found in the books.

Reviews the book "Price Fixation in Indian Industries," by G.P. Kapadia.