Committee on Managerial Accounting.

Abstract The article highlights the report of the 1969-70, 1970-71 Committee on Managerial Accounting of the American Accounting Association. The charge to this committee is to identify, examine, and report on contemporary problems in developing accounting data for the planning, control, and internal performance evaluation function; to critically appraise proposals for action in these areas, to issue broad position statements in specific areas if appropriate, and to make recommendations for research projects. In general, management's decision problems revolve around the optimal allocation of the resources within its control. These decisions are based on methods of evaluation ranging from intuitive or ill-defined techniques for assessing the expected payoffs from the adoption of various actions to well-structured representations of how decision variables, future events and actions interact to yield various levels of expected payoffs. A related proposal in this area uses information theory as a basis for measuring the significance of variances from standards. The ambiguity of the standards approach to information evaluation has led some financial accountants to embark on still another approach to the problem. Evaluating information proposals constitutes the entire area of research in accounting.