COMMENTARY on Accounting Literature.
评论了David Solomons的《制定会计政策》一书，指出其善用类比和例子，讨论了会计如何呈现经济现实、历史成本模型的局限等问题。
Abstract This article comments on changes in accounting literature as pointed out in the book Making Accounting Policy, by David Solomons. One of the great strengths of Solomons' writing lies in his extensive and skillful use of analogies and examples. When discussing the concept of representational faithfulness, for example, he notes that accountants are really striving to present a picture of economic reality in an enterprise's financial statements. He acknowledges that economic reality is incapable of precise definition and continues. It is possible, at least approximately, to represent the degree of fidelity with which stereo sound equipment captures the orchestral sounds heard in a concert hall by measuring the equipment's degree of harmonic distortion. Unfortunately, accounting has not yet found a comparable statistic of financial distortion. Solomons does not discuss accounting policy in an antiseptic or sterile way. He states his own feelings and beliefs about what is good or bad--and most of what he feels is bad about current policy he attributes to continued use of the historical cost accounting model for measuring income long after it has outlived whatever usefulness it might once have had.