Technical And Non-Technical Effect Of Disaster That Are Relevant To Disaster Risk Management Cycle (DRMC)

Disaster is a hazard that has caused heavy loss of life, properties and livelihood. Every year, our country has been affected by disaster, whether natural disaster or manmade disaster. Disaster risk management is a management of resources and responsibility for dealing with all aspect of emergency. An effective disaster risk management requires the combination of knowledge and skills. Disaster Risk Management Cycle (DRMC) is a part of the important efforts which was designed to handle disaster risk. DRMC contains of four phases which are response, recovery, mitigation and preparedness. In this study, the effects of disaster were classified into technical effects and non-technical effect. Technical effects were focused on building structure, maintenance and safety while non-technical effects were focused on economic losses, cost of reconstruction, refurbishment and health. This paper aimed to determine the awareness of project members on DRMC in construction project. Besides, it was also to explore the disaster risk management and related risk that were relevant to a construction project. Questionnaires were distributed to the construction industry players and flood victims. The result obtained based on the survey revealed that majority of respondents did not aware about DRMC. In addition, it was discovered that in each phase of DRMC, both professional and non-professional respondent had different opinion on disaster management as presented by the hierarchy of the types of disaster risk management and the effects of disaster

The commitment of local authorities in building fortress against misappropriation of assets / Rozaiha Ab. Majid … [et al.]

Many local authorities use vision, mission and policy statements to communicate their attitude towards the threat of asset misappropriation among their officials. These statements are imperative to the local authorities for disclosing their responsibility in safeguarding assets and expressing their commitment towards maintaining the highest possible ethical value. In Malaysia, vision, mission and policy are developed and implemented by local authorities to, among others, deter misconduct and dishonesty by their officials. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the level of commitment in preventing misappropriation of asset from occurring. Upon reviewing all Malaysian local authorities’ official websites, the term integrity in vision, mission and policy statement are identified and analysed. The existence of the term integrity can be an indicator to demonstrate the level of commitment of local authority towards maintaining a responsible and respectable organisation. Results from the study indicate most of local authorities in Malaysia are not committed in the fight against fraud including misappropriation of assets because integrity is not emphasized in their vision, mission and policy statements

Money Laundering: A Review of Literature and Future Research

Money laundering is one of the financial crimes that has become a major concern in most countries worldwide. The rising number of reported instances of money laundering could be driven by several reasons. With this growth, there is a growing academic interest in money laundering research; therefore, opportunities should be created for interested academics to evaluate the evolution of research in this field. This study was intended to evaluate published studies in this field from the origin of the idea of money laundering to the present to identify major trends or issues in money laundering research and to propose a research agenda for the future. A qualitative research design was adopted using a content analysis approach. It was found that most of the research focuses more on the relationship of money laundering with other offenses and the detection methods but lacking in the understanding of money laundering and the rules and regulations related to money laundering. This study is intended to be useful to current and future scholars in the field of financial crimes who are interested in the evolution of the literature and in identifying areas for future researc

Empowering Whistleblowing Policy within Public Listed Companies: Current Practice in Malaysia

Whistleblowing is an act of disclosing any unethical or questionable act within an organization by disclosing them to individuals, the public or authorities that could influence the wrongdoing. It became an important part of the corporate governance process as such action would benefit society and the organization. With the increase in whistleblowing cases involving publicly listed companies (PLCs) by the mass media in Malaysia, there is a dearth of information on to what extent these PLCs manage whistleblowing matters. As a general practice, albeit not compulsory, many publicly listed companies disclose whistleblowing statements in their annual report. As this aspect of corporate governance for the employees is still unexplored, this study purports to explore the form of disclosure on whistleblowing policy by publicly listed companies in Malaysia for the financial year ending 2021.  This study is a content analysis of 918 annual reports of companies listed in Malaysia.  The findings reveal that most of the companies disclosed matters relating to whistleblowing policies in their Statement of Corporate Governance section, established whistleblowing policies, and mentioned the importance of whistleblowing activities within sections in their annual reports. This study focuses on companies’ annual reports. Future studies could be conducted to assess whistleblowing disclosure in other mediums such as the official websites of the companies. The study explored the aspect of corporate governance for the employee as practiced within publicly listed companies in Malaysia. The findings revealed the companies’ best practices for promoting transparency and accountability within organizations

Las respuestas de los funcionarios públicos sobre la presentación de denuncias hacia una mejor gobernabilidad

This study investigates the civil servants’s view on the issues of whistleblowing in Malaysia. This study outlines the background of the study by explaining the situation related to fraudulent activities in Malaysia. This leads to the suggestion that whistleblowing is in need as an internal control system to reduce the fraud cases. This study discusses the meaning and definition of whistleblowing and the advantages of the implementation of whistleblowing. Focus group discussion was conducted by dividing the respondents into two teams. Each group comprised of a balanced combination of participants. An investigation officer headed each group.  The findings and discussion will not only be discussing the issues on the whistleblowing based on the focus group discussion but it will also examine whether the findings is consistent within the context of other researches.Este estudio investiga la opinión de los funcionarios públicos sobre los problemas de denuncia de irregularidades en Malasia. Este estudio describe los antecedentes del estudio explicando la situación relacionada con actividades fraudulentas en Malasia. Esto lleva a la sugerencia de que se necesitan denuncias como un sistema de control interno para reducir los casos de fraude. Este estudio analiza el significado y la definición de la denuncia de irregularidades y las ventajas de la implementación de la denuncia de irregularidades. La discusión de los grupos focales se llevó a cabo dividiendo a los encuestados en dos equipos. Cada grupo constaba de una combinación equilibrada de participantes. Un oficial de investigación encabezó cada grupo. Los hallazgos y la discusión no solo discutirán los temas sobre la denuncia de irregularidades en base a la discusión del grupo focal, sino que también examinarán si los hallazgos son consistentes dentro del contexto de otras investigaciones

Assessing the Impact of Public Accounts Committee (PAC) Reports on Government Accountability

This study examines the effectiveness of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) in Malaysia to enrich the understanding of its role in promoting governmental accountability. Through an extensive content analysis of the PAC reports spanning from 2019 to 2022 sourced from the Official Web of Parliament PAC, issues raised by the PAC were categorized into key improvement areas. Findings unveiled 104 flagged issues, with 68 addressed effectively, while 29 remained unresolved despite agreements for action and 7 lacking government response. The government's consideration of 97 out of 104 issues, reflecting a response rate exceeding 90%, underscored the PAC's pivotal role in fostering accountability. This study presents a comprehensive analysis of the prevailing issues identified in PAC reports and their current resolution status. It offers crucial insights for legislators to enhance the efficacy of their oversight procedures. Additionally, it provides empirical data on the impact of legislative oversight on governmental operations. The findings highlight the PAC's capacity to instigate positive reforms within government agencies, thereby enhancing transparency and promoting accountable governance. Future research should explore how the composition of the PAC committees influences issue resolution and government responses, while further investigations are recommended to evaluate the effects of the PAC recommendations on governmental practices

Effects of surfactant on the enzymatic degradation of oil palm empty fruit bunch (OPEFB)

Various pretreatments have been employed to pretreat oil palm empty fruit bunch (OPEFB) to improve sugars production via enzymatic degradation reaction. However, less attention has been paid to investigate the effects of surfactant addition in the OPEFB degradation process. Therefore, the effects of surfactants on degradation of pretreated OPEFB by Aspergillus niger EFB1 crude cellulase were studied. Tween 80 was the most effective surfactant tested. When 0.25% (v/v) Tween 80 was added, the production of reducing sugar increased 63% (from 0.49 to 0.8 g/L). This was the optimum yield recorded. It also improved cellobiose, glucose and xylose production by two folds, seven folds and one fold higher than that without Tween 80, respectively. Tween 80 reduced the loss of cellulases activities where more than 17% of the original cellulases activities were retained after 7 days of degradation. Nonetheless, Tween 80 did not improve the protein concentration consistently. Supplementation of Tween 80 increased lignin removal by 23%. Observations using SEM revealed that, with Tween 80, the presence of pores and surface cracks were more pronounced on the surface of degraded OPEFB fibers. As a whole, the reported effects showed an improved production of reducing sugars in the presence of Tween 80. Thus, Tween 80 addition appeared as a promising method in enhancing the bioconversion of OPEFB into value-added co-products

Open Access Publication of Universiti Sains Malaysia: a Bibliometric Analysis

Open Access (OA) is the new publishing model that allows unrestricted access and reuse of research outputs. OA accelerates discovery in the sense that researchers can freely read and build on new findings based on other research. While public seems to welcome more involvement in OA among academics, many researchers are still discussing about the challenges that they face to publish with OA journals including the issue of article processing charge (APC) and the quality of OA journals. This paper examines several aspects relate to OA publication such as publication productivity, citation impact, subject coverage, and publishing cost of Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) based on SCOPUS data from 2013 to 2015. The findings show that School of Medical Sciences, Physics and Pharmacy dominated the OA publications. Thus, it also indicates that science-based researchers are highly inclined towards publishing in OA as compared to non-science researchers. Top three OA journals in the list are Plos One (Multidisciplinary), Acta Chrystallographica Section E (Chemistry) and Electronic Journal of Geotechnical Engineering (Engineering, Geology). Most of the authors tend to publish in Quartile 3 journals (43%), followed by Q2 (28%), Q1 (16%) and Q4 (13%). However, with regard to citation impact per paper (average), every paper in Q1 journal received 6.25 citations, followed by Q2 (2.8 citations), Q3 (1.33 citations) and Q4 (0.87 citation). The APC range of OA publication found to be from RM0 to RM15, 000 per paper. The study provides useful insights about OA publication among USM researchers which can guide other researchers who wish to engage with OA in the future. Further study can be done by interviewing authors, to further explore on the OA research funding, strategy in choosing OA journals to publish in and also the motivation in publishing with OA