More than forty years ago, Wilkinson (1964) used a story of an ancient blind farmer and his simplistic accounting method of using rocks to monitor the quantity of sheep he had and to ensure that the shepherd he had hired always returned with the same number at the end of the day. He noted that good accounting is not dependent on a particular language. For this reason, it was expected that someday accounting would be the same all over the world.
             The need for outside capital for expansion, for both underdeveloped and developed nations created a demand for understandable accounting that transcended borders. Potential foreign investors need understandable accounting to not only select the business they would like to invest in, but also to monitor how their investment is doing once it's made. Wilkinson (1964) noted that accounting standards in their current state of the mid-1960s that investors could not do this because of the different accounting rules in different countries. More prophetic, he believed that it would be a long time before financial statements would be meaningful across national boundaries. When comparing the differences in accounting treatments of financial statements between Germany, Japan and the United States, it becomes clear that Wilkinson was correct.
             Differences in Accounting Treatments of Financial Statements between Germany, Japan, and the United States:
             More than forty years ago, Wilkinson (1964) used a story of an ancient blind farmer and his simplistic accounting method of using rocks to monitor the quantity of sheep he had, to ensure that the shepherd he had hired always returned with the same number at the end of the day. He noted that good accounting is not dependent on a particular language. For this reason, it was expected that someday accounting would be the same all over the world.
             The need for outside capital for expansion, for both underdeveloped and developed nations created a ...