At best, the lack of precise rules as to the treatment of routine corporate transac- tions forces investors and others who seek to understand accounting statements in all of their complex fullness to wade through pages of qualifying footnotes, the ef- fect of which is often to express serious doubts about the meaningfulness and accu- racy of the figures to which the accountants are attesting. Equally bad, while the footnotes, carefully read and digested, may enable the sophisticated analyst to arrive at a reasonably accurate understanding of the underlying economic reality, the com- parison of figures published by one firm with those of any other is bound to result in seriously misleading distortions. Indeed, the figures for any given company may not be comparable from one year to the next, for although auditing standards require that the principles used by a firm must be "consistently applied" from year to year, the "presumption" of consistency may be overcome where the enterprise justifies the use of an alternative acceptable accounting principle on the basis that it is pref- erable. [Average sentence length: 57 words]