ABSTRACT
This article was commissioned by the editor of Law and Contemporary Problems (Duke University), a law journal which has had a policy of devoting an entire issue to a significant topic. The overall topic for this symposium issue in which Graham’s article was published was Uniformity in Financial Accounting. The editor made the following statements in the foreword:
“This symposium was concerned with the extensive controversy aroused by accountants’ use of a standard of reporting that sanctions financial reports prepared by widely divergent accounting methods, with the result that reports of different firms even within the same industry cannot be readily compared. It is a credit to the accounting profession that much of the pressure for improvement in reporting standards has been generated within the profession itself; but others have now joined the debate. The discontent with the accounting profession’s performance has reached a point where compulsory change through action of the SEC or the courts, is a real possibility. This possibility of legal change, together with the substantial interaction of law and accounting generally, has prompted the editors of Law and Contemporary Problems to provide in this issue the most comprehensive collection of news to date on the subject of the crisis over ‘uniformity’ in financial reporting”.
