Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is to trace the historical development of the standard audit report (SAR) in the United States from its emergence in the 19th century to its current version, and examine how the SAR came full circle to once again include attention to the risk of fraud. While prior research has addressed some of this history, this paper completes the picture to the present date. In the last 100+ years, the SAR has changed from a "certificate" to an "opinion." The scope of the audit has shifted from being an "examination" to the lesser responsibility of an "audit." The emphasis has shifted from absolute assurance to reasonable assurance. Over time, the relative responsibilities of management and auditors have been clarified in the report. Most importantly, the basis for opinion has now moved back to include an assessment of material misstatements caused by error and fraud.

We investigate the relationship between moral reasoning and plagiarism by students in accounting courses. Using the Internet tool, turnitin.com (http://www.turnitin.com), we define plagiarism as the percentage of words copied from the Internet without proper acknowledgement of the source. We use writing assignments at the beginning and the end of the semester in three undergraduate and three graduate capstone accounting courses to hypothesize and find support for a significant inverse relationship between moral reasoning, as measured by the Defining Issues Test, and plagiarism. We also find evidence of significantly more plagiarism at the end of the semester than the beginning, and an inverse relationship between plagiarism and grade point average.

ABSTRACT

The 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century were particularly important for the development of accounting theory. Various accounting historians have emphasized the key role of Italian scholars during this period (Amaduzzi 2001; Bariola 1897; Ceccherelli 1915; Luchini 1898; Melis 1950). One of the most important of these scholars was Fabio Besta. This paper presents both a biography of Fabio Besta and a discussion of his contributions to accounting thought. There are two primary motivations for this paper; namely (1) to contribute to the biographical strand of accounting history research, and (2) to develop a better understanding of the history of public sector/state accounting. Besta is acknowledged as one of the most important Italian scholars of the accounting discipline. His work, focusing on public administration, is remarkable for its clarity and depth, and it is of particular interest today for researchers of business and management, especially with regard to those aspects that differentiate private sector from public administration. Over a century after his death, Besta's work continues to be of great interest. In fact, the debate concerning accounting methods in the public sector has not yet been completely resolved, with the process of change from cash-based to accrual-based accounting still taking place in many countries.

ABSTRACT
This paper traces the evolution of the chief accounting and chief financial officers from minor figures in corporate governance for most of the 20th century to senior management positions by the late 1970s. The paper begins with the testimony before Congress of Arthur Tucker during the debates over the legislation that would become the 1933 Securities Act. Tucker's testimony resulted in the controller or chief accounting officer being included among those persons specifically listed as potentially liable for fraudulent statements or omissions under Section 11 of the Act. The impact of Tucker's efforts, the evolution of the legal liability of financial and accounting officers over the next several decades, the increasing complexity of corporate finance and financial reporting that led to the establishment of the CFO as a position second only to the CEO, and the place of the accounting officer among senior management, are analyzed in the subsequent sections.

This paper reviews 107 academic research publications appearing between 1988 and 2011 that studied accounting changes in post-communist economies. While there has been a significant amount of prior research focusing on accounting changes in economies undergoing the transition from communism to a market economy, there has been a lack of synthesis and overview of the literature in this field. In order to develop such a synthesis and overview, the reviewed publications have been categorized according to a framework proposed by Barbu (2006), and then further classified into changes pertaining to accounting institutions, changes in accounting systems (i.e. legislation, principles and standards), and interactions between economic changes and accounting changes. We then interpret our findings through several theoretical frameworks that provide explanations regarding relationships between economic changes (i.e. in particular the transition from communism to a market economy) and accounting changes. This analysis has led to a proposed new framework to better understand relationships between economic changes and accounting changes during the transition from communism to a market-based economy.

International audience ; As a framework of analysis, Institutional Theory has been used to explain the various ways that organizations develop and change through time in response to various kinds of institutional pressure. This paper contributes to the Institutional Theory literature in several ways. First, the focus of the paper is on recent changes in the regulatory structures for "statutory auditing", an important function in contemporary capitalism. Second, we extend Institutional Theory through an international comparative analysis of changes in the regulatory structures for statutory auditing in the United States, France and Canada. Third, in a manner similar to Dillard et al. (2004), we extend Institutional Theory through an increased focus on the political aspects of institutional change with regard to the regulation of statutory auditing. Our overall finding is that there has been significant change in the regulatory structures for statutory auditing in recent years, resulting in increased levels of institutional isomorphism. Pressures, primarily external to the domestic regulatory frameworks, have resulted in greater legalism in the regulation of statutory auditing in the three countries examined. Globalization of international capital markets partly explains this phenomenon, but coercive isomorphism and mimetic isomorphism are also seen as playing important roles in this process. Key words: ; En tant que cadre d'analyse, la théorie institutionnelle a été utilisée pour expliquer les différentes manières que les organisations développent et évoluent à travers le temps, en réponse à différents types de pressions institutionnelles. Cet article contribue à la littérature de la théorie institutionnelle de plusieurs façons. Tout d'abord, l'objet de l'étude est sur les récents changements dans les structures de régulation de l'audit légale et statutaire, une fonction importante dans le capitalisme contemporain. Deuxièmement, nous étendons la théorie institutionnelle par le biais d'une analyse comparative ...