通过绿色会计有色眼镜教学环境会计外文翻译_精品文档Word格式.doc

1、外文出处 Issues in Accounting Education,1997:P129-140 外文作者 Stephan E.Sefcik,Naomi S.Soderstrom, Christopher H.Stinson 原文：Accounting Through Green-Colored Glasses:Teaching Environmental AccountingStephan E. Sefcik, Naomi S. Soderstromand Christopher H. StinsonABSTRACT: Many firms are finding that some of

2、 their most costly and challenging accounting problems are in the environmental area. Environmental accounting can be defined simply as understanding, recognition and incorporation of the impact of environmental issues upon a firms traditional accounting sub-systems. This paper describes how environ

3、mental accounting issues can be incorporated into existing courses or made the focus of a new elective. Environmental accounting issues provide an interesting, contemporary and functionally integrative way to help students understand the relation among the different areas of accounting （i.e., financ

4、ial, managerial, information systems, auditing and tax）. Examples are included that describe environmental issues in each of these areas.THE major thrust of the Accounting Education Change Commissions （AECC） recommendations is to broaden the scope of accounting education. The traditional approach to

5、 teaching accounting has been to provide students with a mle-oriented taxonomy where textbook-style problems fit neatly into specific topical cells. Many educators feel that this approach has become inadequate for the increasingly complex accounting issues that students will have to address througho

6、ut their careers. Classroom boundaries established between financial, managerial and other accounting subdisciplines can interfere with students learning to incorporate information from each of these areas into decision making. Few real-world accounting problems today can be conveniently compartment

7、alized into a single accounting subdiscipline or methodology. Available solutions should not constrain approaches to problem solving; rather, the problem should drive the solution approach. As accounting educators, we must prepare our students to respond to accounting issues in this fashion. The mos

8、t important skill we can teach our students is to evaluate accounting problems critically and consider multiple approaches in the process of their analysis. Because environmental issues affect all areas of accounting, they provide a particularly effective vehicle for illustrating how to integrate in

9、formation and approaches from multiple accounting areasthereby giving students a deeper and broader understanding of accounting theory and its application. Incorporating environmental accounting issues into accounting curricula can broaden the scope and impact of accounting education in a manner con

10、sistent with the AECCs recommendations. In this paper, we provide examples of topics that can be used to incorporate environmental accounting issues into existing accounting classes. Specifically, we discuss how environmental issues can be incorporated into existing courses covering financial accoun

11、ting, managerial accounting, information systems, auditing or tax. Examples are included that illustrate environmental issues in each of these areas. Although each subdiscipline is addressed separately, we also consider interactions among the areas. We further discuss some advantages of creating a s

12、tand-alone Environmental Accounting elective. Finally, the appendix presents selected environmental accounting issues that arise in many of the available cases. These examples are included to illustrate how environmental accounting facilitates discussion of fundamental accounting issues while highli

13、ghting the integrative nature of the accounting function.BACKGROUNDIn the academic accounting literature of the 1970s, environmental accounting was considered part of the more general area of social accounting （e.g., Belkaoui 1976; Ingram 1978; Ramanathan 1976; Rockness et al. 1977; Spicer 1978）. Po

14、ssibly because there were few explicit economic or legal consequences associated with social accounting, broad academic interest in this area soon faded. However, in the past decade there has been a substantial increase in international, federal, state and even local environmental regulation, as wel

15、l as a dramatic increase in the number of lawsuits arising from violation of environmental laws and regulations. Because these changes affect all areas of accounting （and other business practices as well）, consideration of Environmental Accounting provides students with an opportunity to examine how accounting practices respond to new legal, economic, regulatory and even ethical pressures. Furthermore, firms are becoming more interested in developing and improving their own environmental accounting strategies and systems （Schmidheiny 1992）. Arguably, a