This article presents comments on an article written by M.E. Francis, published in the April 1973 issue of the journal "The Accounting Review," which contends that accountants are ill-equipped to contribute in a constructive way either to improve the methods of assessing the state of society and social programs or to the application of evaluative procedures in the allocation of resources to the efforts to improve social well-being. The article provides a useful service to the profession by cautioning accountants against jumping upon the social accounting bandwagon without knowing its ultimate destination or their own ability to steer it in an appropriate direction. The argument of Francis against a potential role for accountants is three-fold: accountants lack the expertise to attest to sampling methods and statistical series derived from samples; accountants do not have the knowledge or experience to determine the relevant statistical information to be collected, analyzed, and reported; and accountants lack the statistical training to improve the accuracy of economic data. The accountant, as a member of a team which is likely to include specialists from other disciplines, independently appraises program results and reports his findings to the policy makers. Contrary to the implications of Francis, accountants seldom, if ever, work with numbers that are finitely accurate.

This article describes a taxonomy of cognitive skills which has been designed by a group of educational psychologists and identifies the implications thereof for the development of accounting courses and the accounting curriculum. The taxonomy is designed to give precise direction to the learning process and is expressed in terms of expected student behavior at each level in the accounting program. The primary focus of this paper is on the financial accounting program. The taxonomy is relevant to the development of curriculum in that it reveals the elements in the learning process, orders them in an educationally logical sequence, and helps explain the interrelationships among them. It raises questions not only of what should be taught, but also of when and why it should be taught.

The article reports that accountants need to reach unanimity on the fundamental question of the nature of external accounting exchanges before guidelines can be completed for the valuation of the "two-way flow of goods." It is, in essence, a contention that writers will continue to be at odds on the issue of the method for attaching values to the exchanges until agreement is reached on the question of the nature of the exchanges. The writers agree that a valuation scheme is not complete unless developed for both internal exchanges, e.g., recording of depreciation, and external exchanges, e.g., recording of purchase of an automobile. However, it seems reasonable to conclude that most internal exchanges are mere reclassifications of prior external exchanges, and that it is therefore fundamentally more important to have an appropriate understanding of external exchanges. The paper covers aspects of the overall valuation problem, but it does not seek to argue for or against the hypotheses of S & F and N & P.