George Sorter’s Influence on Accounting Thought

An innovative accounting theorist and educator, Sorter was concerned about how accounting information could be used in financial and management decision making. He formulated an events approach to accounting that called for providing a vast array of presumably relevant information to users of financial reports to allow them as individuals to select whichever data they deemed suitable to make their own  long run forecasts and their own financial and management decisions. He emphasized that valuation of the firm is a subjective endeavor, a matter of individual user perception.  He served as the research director of the AICPA’s Trueblood Report (1973), which laid the foundation for the FASB’s Conceptual Framework.