4. Regulatory Compliance
Era—The Great Depression in the
U.S. resulted in regulatory reforms to
protect investors from shady financial reporting
practices (1930s). In one sense, they were a setback to
management accounting because the reforms established
simplified rules that calculated inventory values and costs
of goods sold (COGS), yet the overhead cost allocation
methods were misleading because they were based on
cost factors that violated costing’s causality principle (the
need for cause-and-effect insights).