Reviews the book 'Bank Costs for Planning and Control.'

This article presents response from the authors to the criticism of their article on the concept of social accounting, published in the April 1973 issue of the journal "The Accounting Review." The primary purpose of the authors' paper was to clarify the concept of social accounting. The authors agrees that the accounting literature does indeed reflect a misunderstanding of the most feasible role of accountants in the evaluation of the effectiveness of social programs (EESP). Moreover, the literature reflects the fact that accountants have also misunderstood the purposes and objectives of social accounting and thus of EESP. One can only speculate about the extent to which these conceptual misunderstandings have contributed to the ill-conceived suggestions concerning most feasible roles. But a U.S. General Accounting Office report cited simply reinforce the authors' view that accountants have neither the training nor the experience necessary to conduct nonfinancial program evaluation or to steer the social accounting bandwagon or to evaluate the effectiveness of the management and operation of social programs.

This article presents a reply from the authors to the criticism of their article underlying a set of market-clearing security prices by Robert P. Magee, published in a recent issue of the journal "The Accounting Review." In their earlier work, the authors showed that there is a potential bias against non-extant accounting alternatives built into association tests based on extant security prices. Magee shows that under certain conditions the bias may be sufficiently reduced such that a nonextant alternative which actually contains more information will indeed be judged so on the basis of its association with market prices. He concludes that the conditions that they specified under which association tests will be valid for nonextant alternatives are too restrictive. There is no nontrivial accounting disclosure change that will not potentially cause a redistribution of wealth; consequently, there is no change for which social welfare impacts can be accurately surrogated by results of market association tests for differential information content. The authors concluded that market association tests may provide data that policy makers can use to revise their prior beliefs about the relative desirability of alternative accounting disclosure requirements.

Reviews the book 'The Corporate Social Audit,' by Raymond A. Bauer and Dan H. Fenn Jr.