ABSTRACT
This article is one of Willard’s early statements in print regarding the price level issue in financial reporting. He became one of the strong early proponents of the desirability of adjusting financial statements for price level changes and preferred price level accounting because of the tie to historical cost. Two aspects of this article are worthy of note. Although several authors quoted by Willard tended to confuse price level accounting and replacement cost accounting, Willard did not make an issue of this confusion, for whatever reason. If his comments on the price level research project are compared with his comments in his letter to the editor of the Journal of Accountancy in response to an article on replacement value theory by Goudeket, one can see in the intervening years that he had focused more clearly on the distinction between price level accounting and replacement cost accounting. This is not to say that he did not recognize the difference in his 1953 speech before the annual meeting of the American Accounting Association, but in the years up to the time of the letter to the Journal, he became more and more aware of the confusion between the two approaches in the minds of others.
