ABSTRACT
Sixty-five years have elapsed since the publication of MacNeal’s Truth in Accounting . Little seems to have changed.
Financial statements are undoubtedly the principal means by which investors are informed. They are undoubtedly relied upon by millions of investors. But they can never become the key to the solution of the basic problem of protecting the small investor until the faulty accounting principles underlying their preparation are changed to permit a presentation of simple truth as it is instinctively understood by laymen everywhere. … Financial statements today are composed of a bewildering mixture of accounting conventions, historical data, and present facts, wherein even accountants are often unable to distinguish between truth and fiction.
(1939: 57 and vii)