Best-paper awards;

              To the three literati among our staff,
managers, and principals whose papers
have been judged the most outstand­ing
produced during the year ended
September 30, 1964, it is a pleasure to
give well deserved recognition in these
pages. All three award-winning papers
were considered to be of exceptionally
high quality.
Francis C. Oatway, senior account­ant
in our Washington office, won First
Award of $500 for his paper Motiva­tion
and Responsibility in Tax Practice:
The Need for Definition. Outstanding
in thoroughness of preparation, docu­mentation,
and clarity of expression,
this paper in September 1964 was en­tered
by Mr. Oatway in the J. K. Lasser
Tax Essay Contest conducted by New
York University, winning first place
there also and a prize of $1,500. The
topic assigned for examination was:
Are the existing canons of practice of
the legal and accounting professions
adequate for the modern practitioner?
The contest was open, without geo­graphic
limitation, to senior and gradu­ate
law school students and senior and
graduate accounting students; to prac­ticing
lawyers and practicing account­ants;
and to teachers of law or account­ing.
The maximum age requirement
was 28. It is expected that New York
University's Tax Law Review will pub­lish
the paper later this year.
Robert D. Niemeyer, MAS manager
in our Chicago office, won Second
Award of $300 for his paper Inventory
Control. By skillful handling of termi­nology
necessarily technical, Mr. Nie­meyer
has rendered a difficult subject
understandable. His paper discusses
formal methods of determining inven­tory
re-order points in terms of "how
much" and "when" factors. The July-
August 1964 issue of Management
Services magazine published this article.
Ernest H. Kenyon, principal in our
Omaha office, won Third Award of
$200 for his excellent analysis of the
problem Corporate Distributions—Liq­uidating
and Dividend. The reader in­terested
in an introduction to this tax
subject should find this paper valuable.
The paper considers some of the pitfalls
in identifying corporate distributions
and anticipating how they will be
taxed. Mr. Kenyon gave his paper in
October 1963 before the Tenth Annual
Institute on Taxation of the Texas Soci­ety
of CPAs in both Houston and Dal­las,
and it was published in our Selected
Papers — 1963. Later this year The
Journal of Taxation will reproduce it in
their new publication Accountants Tax
Journal.
For readers newly affiliated with the
Firm a brief review of the Awards pro­gram
may be of interest. In the Fall of
each year the Firm presents three
awards to staff accountants, principals,
and managers who have written papers
on professional and technical subjects,
presented them before audiences out­side
the Firm, arranged for their pub­lication,
or gained recognition for them
in some other way deemed outstanding.
Awards for the current year bring the
number of winning papers on account­ing
and auditing subjects to fourteen,
on taxes to eight, and in management
advisory services to ten.
Across the country, the number of
offices that have had winning papers is
fifteen; six have had more than one.
An interesting feature of judging the
papers is to observe the changes that
take place in an individual's writing
over a period of time. At some point in
a writer's development it becomes ap­parent
that he has hit his stride—that
he no longer regards his writing as a
chore to be gotten out of the way but
as an occupation that gives him consid­erable
satisfaction. What brings about
the change is self-discovery of the crea­tive
faculty and how it can dispel the
tedium that many people associate with
the hard work of writing.
The first step in a man's approach
to serious professional writing is essen­tially
one of mental discipline. Ernest
Hemingway wrote: "Easy writing makes
hard reading." We like to think of the
Best-Paper Awards less in terms of
their worth as "gold medals" of achieve­ment
than as indicators of hard mental
discipline—the training of the mind that
enables a man to carry to completion a
well thought-out thesis of substance,
sound technically and readable in style.
To all who during the year have di­rected
their efforts toward the reward­ing
goal of constructive professional
writing we express our appreciation.
Discover for yourself, if you have not
yet done so, the relation between creat­ive
mental power and serious profes­sional
writing. In the process you are
likely to find much personal satisfaction!
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