ABSTRACT
This paper was presented at the Southern Regional Conference of the Controllers Institute of America (now the Financial Executives Institute) in New Orleans in March, 1959. The subject of the paper combines the two accounting topics that were Willard’s favorites, namely, depreciation and price level accounting. With respect to depreciation this paper projects his philosophy that the most reasonable basis for allocating property cost should be in relation to the net service value rendered by the property, although he did not define “net service value”. He was strongly opposed to the accounting profession giving management a “free choice” in the selection of depreciation methods and would have warmly endorsed the accounting research study on depreciation that was sponsored by the AICPA in the 1970s. However, he would have been very disappointed that the study did not result in any restriction on the free-choice approach to selecting depreciation methods.
