Curbing Tax Evasion in Singapore: The Role of Governance and Corporate Governance Standards in the Tax Agency

This article introduces a simple framework to link corruption, corporate governance and tax evasion. It argues that attempts to mitigate tax evasion have to incorporate measures to curb corruption in the public sector and raise the standard of corporate governance in the tax agency. The proposition is tested by means of a case study, involving Singapore’s tax agency, the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore. The article makes recommendations so that tax compliance could be encouraged with the greatest possible benefits

Trust and Ethics in Finance : Innovative ideas from the Robin Cosgrove Prize

The values that guide finance professionals and the core role played by trust in the modern finance industry have been the dominant themes of the best papers submitted for the Robin Cosgrove Prize since it was launched in 2006. Inviting young people to submit innovative ideas to advance ethical approaches to the world of finance in its many manifestations has stimulated a global debate on the role of ethics and integrity in finance. It is important to note that the prize was launched before the topic of ethics in finance became fashionable. It is not a reactive exercise to the current crisis. The aim is to prompt a shift in thinking throughout the world of finance – the fresh ideas submitted for the prize have global relevance. The twenty-three essays in this volume come from young researchers on six continents; their innovative ideas will contribute to future-oriented ethical solutions

Corporate Social Responsibility Indexes: Measure for Measure

This thesis investigates criteria used by research agencies that publish ratings of business organisations in respect of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance and the relationship of these criteria to underlying ethical principles. Companies are rated according to CSR criteria. Observation of different rating agencies' results for the same, or similar organisations, shows a significant variation in results. Variations in rating must result either from different criteria being applied or from criteria addressing similar topics being assessed in a different way. Criteria from different rating agencies are found to be comparable. Thus if rating criteria are derived from an ethical view of the responsibilities of business organisations, then inconsistent results may be explained by variations in the ethical basis of corporate social responsibility used by agencies. Subject companies are rated under broad categories such as corporate governance, human rights and the environment. These categories contain specific criteria. My investigation compares the criteria used by major rating agencies and identifies the ethical basis, if any, that can be attributed to each criterion. The study finds that there are clearly identifiable links between a number of criteria used by each rating agency and the ethical theories selected for evaluation. Further, there is sufficient difference between the agencies to characterise each in relation to one or more of the ethical theories selected. There is inconsistency, however, within each agency's basis of principles as well as between agencies, which indicates an unsatisfactory lack of explicit relationship between the general, and reasonably consistent, definition of corporate social responsibility and application of coherent ethical principles. In practical terms around 10% of all investments in the United States, representing 2.3 trillion dollars, are invested in ethical or screened funds that rely on these and similar rating agencies results to determine CSR performance of firms. The large variation in results demonstrated in my thesis suggests that very significant financial decisions are based, at least in part, on inconsistent data. I suggest in my conclusion that if agencies were to consider, justify and clearly state the ethical basis from which their criteria derive, then investment managers and their clients could be more certain that their CSR principles were being upheld

Search Rank Fraud Prevention in Online Systems

The survival of products in online services such as Google Play, Yelp, Facebook and Amazon, is contingent on their search rank. This, along with the social impact of such services, has also turned them into a lucrative medium for fraudulently influencing public opinion. Motivated by the need to aggressively promote products, communities that specialize in social network fraud (e.g., fake opinions and reviews, likes, followers, app installs) have emerged, to create a black market for fraudulent search optimization. Fraudulent product developers exploit these communities to hire teams of workers willing and able to commit fraud collectively, emulating realistic, spontaneous activities from unrelated people. We call this behavior “search rank fraud”. In this dissertation, we argue that fraud needs to be proactively discouraged and prevented, instead of only reactively detected and filtered. We introduce two novel approaches to discourage search rank fraud in online systems. First, we detect fraud in real-time, when it is posted, and impose resource consuming penalties on the devices that post activities. We introduce and leverage several novel concepts that include (i) stateless, verifiable computational puzzles that impose minimal performance overhead, but enable the efficient verification of their authenticity, (ii) a real-time, graph based solution to assign fraud scores to user activities, and (iii) mechanisms to dynamically adjust puzzle difficulty levels based on fraud scores and the computational capabilities of devices. In a second approach, we introduce the problem of fraud de-anonymization: reveal the crowdsourcing site accounts of the people who post large amounts of fraud, thus their bank accounts, and provide compelling evidence of fraud to the users of products that they promote. We investigate the ability of our solutions to ensure that fraud does not pay off

Integrating ESG Factors in Equity Investing

This project aimed at developing an effective methodology to incorporate Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors into equity investment process of Brasil Capital, a Brazilian asset management company. The project was divided in three phases. The first phase was a research about ESG Integration practices, with its relevant factors, issues, source of information, and tools and techniques. The second phase was an analysis on Brasil Capital: corporate profile, investment decision processes, culture, organizational structure, and its adherence to an ESG integration. The third phase consists of a guide to the integration of ESG factors into Brasil Capital investment decision process, with recommendations and next steps.Master of ScienceSchool for Environment and SustainabilityUniversity of Michiganhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140076/1/FernandezMaestri_Carolina_Practicum_Final.pd

Duty and Diversity

In the wake of the brutal deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, a slew of reforms from Wall Street to the West Coast have been introduced, all aimed at increasing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) in corporations. Yet the reforms face difficulties ranging from possible constitutional challenges to critical limitations in their scale, scope and degree of legal obligation and practical effects. In this Article, we provide an old answer to the new questions facing DEI policy, and offer the first close examination of how corporate law duties impel and facilitate corporate attention to diversity. Specifically, we show that corporate fiduciaries are bound by their duties of loyalty to take affirmative steps to make sure that corporations comply with important civil rights and anti-discrimination laws and norms designed to ensure fair access to economic opportunity. We also show how corporate law principles like the business judgment rule do not just authorize, but indeed encourage American corporations to take effective action to help reduce racial and gender inequality, and increase inclusion, tolerance and diversity given the rational basis that exists connecting good DEI practices corporate reputation and sustainable firm value. By both incorporating requirements to comply with key anti-discrimination laws mandatorily, and enabling corporate DEI policies that go well beyond the legal minimum, corporate law offers critical tools with which corporations may address DEI goals that other reforms do not—and that can embed a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in all aspects of corporate interactions with employees, customers, communities, and society generally. The question therefore is not whether corporate leaders can take effective action to help reduce racial and gender inequality—but will they

Game-theoretic Models of Web Credibility

Research on Web credibility assessment can significantly benefit from new models that are better suited for evaluation and study of adversary strategies. Currently employed models lack several important aspects, such as the explicit modeling of Web content properties (e.g. presentation quality), the user economic incentives and assessment capabilities. In this paper, we introduce a new, game-theoretic model of credibility, referred to as the Credibility Game. We perform equilibrium and stability analysis of a simple variant of the game and then study it as a signaling game against naive and expert information consumers. By a generic economic model of the player payoffs, we study, via simulation experiments, more complex variants of the Credibility Game and demonstrate the effect of consumer expertise and of the signal for credibility evaluation on the evolutionary stable strategies of the information producers and consumers

Markets as Monitors: A Proposal to Replace Class Actions with Exchanges as Securities Fraud Enforcers

Fraud in the securities markets has been a focus of legislative reform in recent years. Corporations-especially those in the high-technology industry-have complained that they are being unfairly targeted by plaintiffs\u27 lawyers in class action securities fraud lawsuits. The corporations\u27 complaints led to the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 ( Reform Act ). The Reform Act attempted to reduce meritless litigation against corporate issuers by erecting a series of procedural barriers to the filing of securities class actions. Plaintiffs\u27 attorneys warned that the Reform Act and the resulting decrease in securities class actions would leave corporate fraud unchecked and deprive defrauded investors of compensation, thereby undermining investor confidence in the markets. Despite these dire predictions, however, after a brief initial decline securities fraud class actions are now being filed in greater numbers than before the passage of the Reform Act. Reform efforts thus continue. The President recently signed legislation preempting state securities class actions, which were thought to be avenues for circumventing the Reform Act\u27s restrictions. The principal target of reform has been class action lawsuits against corporations. Such lawsuits are based on misstatements by corporate officers that distort the secondary market price of the corporation\u27s securities. In these so-called fraud on the market cases, plaintiffs\u27 attorneys sue the corporation and its officers under Rule 10b-5 of the Securities Exchange Act. They sue on behalf of classes of investors who have paid too much for their shares or (less frequently) sold their shares for too little because of price distortion caused by the misstatements. In the typical case, the corporation has neither bought nor sold its securities, and, accordingly, has not benefited from the fraud. Investors can nonetheless recover their losses from the corporation based on its managers\u27 misstatements. Given the volume of trading in secondary trading markets, the damages recoverable in such suits can be a substantial percentage of the corporation\u27s total capitalization, reaching the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Advocates of reform contend that risk-averse managers are too anxious to settle such suits, even when the suits have little merit. Settlement is attractive because it allows managers to avoid personal liability by paying the claims with the corporation\u27s money. My argument is that we should stop attempting to reform fraud on the market class actions and instead replace them with organizations better suited to the task of antifraud monitoring. In this Article I analyze the social costs created by fraud on the market and the roles of compensation and deterrence in reducing the costs of fraud. I argue that compensation does not play an important role in controlling those costs. Accordingly, a rational investor would not willingly pay for the compensation provided by the class action regime if deterrence could be achieved at a lower cost through alternative means. The lower-cost alternative that I propose is antifraud enforcement by the securities exchanges where the trading affected by the fraud took place. The primary social cost of fraud on the market is less trading by investors who seek to avoid being on the losing end of a trade that occurs at a fraudulently distorted market price. The reduction in liquidity caused by lower trading volume most directly harms broker-dealers, who depend on trading and trading commissions for a substantial portion of their revenues. Broker-dealers hold a property right in their exchange memberships, which effectively makes them the residual claimants of the exchanges. Thus, the incentives of the exchanges\u27 members should push exchanges to enforce vigorously prohibitions against fraud on the market.9 Part I analyzes the causes of fraud in secondary trading markets and the social costs produced by fraud. Part II discusses the roles of compensation and deterrence in controlling those costs and concludes that deterrence, not compensation, should be the primary objective of an antifraud regime. Part II then looks at the compensatory class action regime and shows how the goal of compensation undermines the deterrent value of class actions. Part III assesses the organization and regulation of the exchanges and how they affect the exchanges\u27 potential role as enforcement monitors. Part IV outlines an alternative enforcement regime administered by the securities exchanges where the trading affected by fraud took place. Instead of paying money damages to investors, corporations--along with their managers and outside professionals--would pay civil penalties and disgorge fraudulently obtained benefits to the exchanges. Corporations and their affiliates would also be subject to injunctive relief. Part V discusses potential criticisms of my proposal based on the NYSE\u27s historical enforcement record and the implications of that history for exchange antifraud enforcement. Part VI evaluates potential alternatives to my proposal. Finally, a brief Conclusion summarizes the main advantages of exchange antifraud enforcement

Best Practices in Hotel Operations

Operations is the heart of a hotel. Efforts to improve operations can focus on a single department or address the entire organization