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Betterment Accounting: A Requiem By The Sec, James M. Van Nostrand

Law Faculty Scholarship

The railroad industry, unlike almost every other industry, has a depreciation accounting system all its own known as betterment accounting. In sharp contrast to generally-accepted methods of depreciation, such as ratable depreciation, where the cost of the capital asset is systematically expensed over the useful life of the asset, under the betterment practice, the initial cost of track structures is recorded as a nondepreciable asset. Subsequent replacement costs are then charged directly to operating expense as an "adequately reliable" measure of depreciation. Justifications for this unique system of accounting relate primarily to the peculiar nature of railroad track structure-a large …