BIG DATA ANALYTICS CAPABILITIES FOR IFRS 9 SUCCESS

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, financial reporting standards have proven inadequate in providing sound governance. With financial data being heavily dependent on information systems, a new standard, IFRS 9, is being adopted. IFRS 9 could leverage recent advancements in big data ana-lytics capabilities to improve financial compliance and assurance. While such potential is widely acknowledged, big data analytics capabilities have not yet been adequately identified and validated in the context of financial reporting compliance. In addressing such discrepancy, this study attempts to explore the relationship between a firm’s capability to conduct big data analytics and their perception of IT applications leveraged for compliance with the standard. This study identifies four constituent capabilities and provides empirical validation for their interrelation with a holistic big data analytics construct. It addresses the link between capabilities and perceived IFRS 9 benefits by a range of insti-tutional stakeholders. The findings suggest that analytics governance, analytics personnel capabilities, and Big Data characteristics have a significant influence on big data analytics capabilities. The latter was found to have a significant relationship with perceived benefits of IFRS 9. These findings hold im-portant implications to theory and practice given the impending mass adoption of IFRS 9

The effects of disruptive technologies on modern accounting

Disruptive technologies are any sort of technolo and industries function. gy that disrupts the way businesses consumers, Disruptive technologies are significantly impacting all aspects of the accounting world, ranging Automation and other from employees to the standards these individuals must follow. technologies have eliminated the need for certain skills and replaced them with a demand for more analytical based skills. The increased productivity associated with disruptive technologies has increased firm’s growth. Accordingly, time saved on once repetitive tasks can now be used demands. Governments and the to offer a wide array of services to clients, w governing bodies of accountants also need ho also have new to deal changes and are adapting to do so. with these changes and are adapting to do so.Thesis (B.?)Honors Colleg

The capability and competency requirements of auditors in today's complex global business environment.

In 2013 ICAS and the UK Financial Reporting Council (FRC) commissioned two international teams of researchers to undertake studies to investigate what mix of attributes, competencies, professional skills and qualities need to be combined in an audit team in order for it to perform a high quality public interest audit in a modern and complex global business environment. This report is one of the two independent research reports published as a result of this call for research. This report explores the views of key audit stakeholders in Australia, South Africa and the UK. The researchers conducted interviews with individuals who are directly involved in the audit process (engagement partners, chairs of audit committees, chief financial officers, chief audit executives (internal audit) and experts) in six of the largest listed companies in Australia, South Africa and the UK. Individuals who have some oversight, public policy or educative role with regard to audit, in each of the three countries, were also interviewed, giving a total of 84 interviews

Creating and Capturing Value at Work : Who Benefits? Part 2: Measurements Report

In Creating and Capturing Value at Work: Who benefits? Part 1, we made four key arguments 1. Value has to be considered as an integrated process, combining creation and capture. 2. The relationship between valuecreation and capture can be complex and varied, and cannot be ‘read off’ easily, located as it is in specific institutional, legal, governance and organisational contexts. 3. Notwithstanding the dominance of the maximising shareholder value (MSV) model, there is scope for strategic choices that mediate the relationship between value-creation and capture. 4. Disciplinary perspectives act as different lenses or prisms with which to view value and that reframing value from a multidisciplinary perspective has significant potential to improve our understanding of the value process and the scope for – and challenges in – exercising strategic choice to deliver value outcomes. In this follow-up report some of these key arguments are applied more concretely to measures or indicators of value. Measures of value can be narrow or broad. Value can also be measured at different levels. And measures of value can also appear to be – and be – inconsistent with each other. The idiom of ‘what gets measured gets managed’ is at one level true and yet can obscure costly, perverse and unintended consequences. Measures or indicators of value in businesses range from a relatively small number that are required by financial regulation and the vast array of measures collected in organisations at organisational, sub-unit and individual levels. Measures of value and costs of that value (that is, externalities) also exist at an extra-organisational level, for example at the level of the national or regional economy

Integrating Big Data Analytics with U.S. SEC Financial Statement Datasets and the Critical Examination of the Altman Z’-Score Model

The main aim of this thesis is to document the process of developing Big Data analytical applications and their integration with financial statement datasets. These datasets are publicly available on the U.S. SEC (Security and Exchange Commission) website which contains the annual and quarterly reports of approximately 8000 companies. Through its Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval (EDGAR) system, the SEC receives several terabytes of data in the mandatory filings from its registrants. This vast amount of data can potentially provide a valuable resource for those parties (such as investors, analysts, regulators and researchers) who are interested in assessing the financial performance and position of companies. Traditionally, the quarterly and annual reports were submitted in standard PDF, HTML and Text files. The data from these files could be manually extracted and analysed, but this process (still used by some analysts and researchers) is costly and time-consuming. In 2009, the SEC mandated all listed companies to use a digital reporting format known as XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). The intention of this was to improve financial reporting in terms of transparency and efficiency. In order to take advantage of structured data contained in the XBRL format, a variety of methods such as novel extraction algorithms and data mining techniques have been developed. However, several limitations and issues have emerged. These include a lack of automated connectivity between the EDGAR web interface and the terms used in structured taxonomies, and the inability to provide access to multiple files in a single query. Given the challenging and complex nature of these issues, this research project used the financial statement datasets available on the SEC website to extract relevant financial information from the company’s annual reports. The novel aspect of this research is providing big data analytical applications using cloud technologies that can efficiently perform datasets integration and transformation into a format suitable for further analysis. The result of this is that the extracted financial data can be analysed to assess the performance of companies, and this facilitates the critical examination of widely used credit assessment models such as the Altman Z’-Score

The Impact of Disruptive Technologies in Finance and Accounting: A Systematic Literature Review

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Knowledge Management and Business IntelligenceThe digital transition era, marked by a strong evolution of Information Technologies, and its massive expansion towards all products, services, and sectors, has changed all known methods for carrying out and conducting all sorts of professional practices. Within the scope of accounting activities and transactions related to accounting, various tasks have started to be automatized with the help of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Hence, no longer existing the need of spending time on some of the repetitive day-to-day tasks, professionals in these areas will have more time and freedom to perform predictive business analysis, to collect and report financial data, which will most likely become vital to assist decision-making and possible attraction of new investments. As such, there is a clear link between accounting and the emergence of disruptive technologies, which indicates an interesting research area for accounting information systems researchers. What is the impact of disruptive technologies in accounting practices? What is the role played by accountants to work alongside their digital colleagues? What are the skills that accountants may have to be future proof in an ever-changing digital environment? This dissertation aims to answer these questions by following a qualitative and exploratory approach, through a systematic literature review. The analysis reveals that the impact of disruptive technologies in finance and accounting can be summarized in four main domains, Strategic Management, Technology Innovation, Business Acumen and Operations and Accounting Provision. We review the content of recent academic literature regarding the relationship between disruptive technologies and accounting and highlight research gaps and opportunities for future research

Linking Report Individualization and Report Standardization: A Configurational Perspective

Many organizations are facing the challenge that employees supplement their standardized Ac-counting Information Systems (AIS) with individually tinkered spreadsheets or other types of workaround systems. While such supplements provide employees with the flexibility to adjust the AIS to their individual preferences and to respond quickly to new opportunities, these sup-plements also cause adverse effects such as data redundancy, limited report reuse, loss of eco-nomic scale effects, and loss of compliance with regulatory and supervisory reporting require-ments. \ \ To provide organizations with a model for balancing report standardization and report individu-alization, I explore and analyse the AIS of four organizations. Specifically, I adopt a configura-tional perspective to examine two AIS use processes simultaneously: report standardization and report individualization. The resulting model indicates the need for an iterative approach which supports discussion and feedback on individualized reports and views individualized reports as prototypes for standardized reports. I conclude may work by discussing the value and limitations of the model and research design.

DOC 2016-03 Master of Professional Accountancy (MPAcc), Full Proposal

Legislative Authorit