Fraud Requirements in SSARS 10

With the issuance of Statement on Standards for Accounting and Review Services (SSARS) 10, Performance of Review Engagements, which is effective for review engagements for periods ending on or after Dec 15, 2004, the AICPA Accounting and Review Services Committee requires accountants performing review engagements to make inquiries regarding fraud. Furthermore, the management representation letter must address fraud. The authors reviewed the comment letters that the AICPA received in response to the exposure draft for SSARS 10 and conducted a survey of practitioners after the statement was issued. SSARS 10 amends SSARS 1, Compilation and Review of Financial Statements, primarily by expanding inquiries during review engagements to include fraud and by requiring that the management representation letter address fraud. Review engagements provide limited, not positive, assurance. While additional inquiries and disclosures in management\u27s representation letter should be relatively easy to incorporate, the authors could find no substantive reasons for these procedures to be considered necessary

Sacred sites, contested rites/rights: contemporary pagan engagements with the past

Our Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights project (www.sacredsites.org.uk) examines physical, spiritual and interpretative engagements of today’s Pagans with sacred sites, theorises ‘sacredness’, and explores the implications of pagan engagements with sites for heritage management and archaeology more generally, in terms of ‘preservation ethic’ vis a vis active engagement. In this paper, we explore ways in which ‘sacred sites’ --- both the term and the sites --- are negotiated by different interest groups, foregrounding our locations, as an archaeologist/art historian (Wallis) and anthropologist (Blain), and active pagan engagers with sites. Examples of pagan actions at such sites, including at Avebury and Stonehenge, demonstrate not only that their engagements with sacred sites are diverse and that identities --- such as that of ‘new indigenes’ --- arising therefrom are complex, but also that heritage management has not entirely neglected the issues: in addition to managed open access solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, a climate of inclusivity and multivocality has resulted in fruitful negotiations at the Rollright Stones.</p

Religious actors, civil society, and the development agenda: The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion

This article uses the World Bank\u27s engagement with religious actors to analyse their differentiated role in setting the development agenda raising three key issues. First, engagements between international financial institutions (IFIs) and religious actors are formalised thus excluding many of the actors embedded within communities in the South. Secondly, the varied politics of religious actors in development are rarely articulated and a single position is often presented. Thirdly, the potential for development alternatives from religious actors excluded from these engagements is overlooked, due in part to misrecognition of the mutually constitutive relationship between secular and sacral elements in local contexts

East of the West: Repossessing the Past In India

Public history, as it is practised in India, defies easy attempts at classification. This is partially because hardly anything that would be recognised as public history is identified as such by its author(s). For the term, despite its ever-increasing acceptance outside India as a discipline and a practice distinct from history, has yet to gain any currency within India. Any attempt to identify works that are self-consciously public history in the Indian context will likely not yield much fruit. Nor, for that matter, will borrowing any of the many definitions of the term from the West and trying to find works that adhere to it in India. Instead, this chapter will try to highlight the myriad forms that public engagements with the past have taken place in India. This article focuses specifically on museums, arguably the preeminent site of public engagements with the past in India. To that end, it will look at a new generation of museums that are charting new paths towards enabling a better public engagement with the past. It will also analyse a few institutional forms of public engagements with the past

The sustaining possibilities of service-learning engagements

In this article, we explore two possibilities which arise from service-learning engagements, both from a narrative perspective. First, we consider the possibility that service-learning may be a sustaining experience for in-service teachers. And, second, we suggest that intentional inquiry into this experience for in-service teachers may foster the experience of sustaining themselves and of being sustained in their professional and personal lives. Through storying and re-storying our experiences during a service-learning engagement in Kenya over seven years ago and through storying the reverberations of these experiences in the intervening seven-plus years, we suggest that when attended to narratively, the interactions and situations encountered in intentional service-learning engagements through narrative inquiry give in-service teachers ways of sustaining themselves and being sustained as teachers

Literary Exposures for an Ecological Age

This paper argues that exposures through literature to human fragility and vulnerability, which are default modes of life within the relational collective on-page, rehearse critical engagements for life off-page during a time of climate change

Could action research provide the key to true workplace collaboration?

Management practices that serve principles of "efficiency" and "effectiveness" in the capitalist understanding of such notions have generated work practices that purport to empower employees under the guise of employee participation programs. In the fieldwork reported here, action research was used as a vehicle to initiate collaborative workplace engagements for the benefit of an organization and its employees. Our results have implications for action researchers and for social construction theory. We found that collaborative behaviors, modeled through action research to all organization levels, have the potential to initiate change toward respectful pluralist engagements. Authentic participation requires a supportive environment in order for organizations and their employees to truly flourish. It became apparent that New Zealand employment law provided a framework within which to work collaboratively, but the will to do so was not fully evident. However, through action research, the participants began to construct their "common sense" (Berger & Luckmann, 1966: 37) of their shared workplace reality and goals

Benchmarking the production of audit services: An efficiency frontier approach

To compete effectively in an increasingly competitive audit market audit firms need information on the efficiency of the audit services they offer. This study reports on the cost and labor efficiency for a sample of 114 audit engagements conducted by one of the (then) Big 6 audit firms. Estimating the efficiency of audit engagements is a form of benchmarking, of which economics oriented research has seen many applications. The application to auditing however is, as far as we know, relatively new. To determine the cost and labor efficiency of the audit engagements we employ the statistical technique of stochastic frontier estimation. Using models from the well-known and established audit fee and audit production literature we find that for our sample audit services are produced in a cost and labor efficient manner. Keywords: accounting and auditing, economics; audit production, cost and labor efficiency, stochastic frontier estimation Data availability: The data used in this study are proprietary to the audit firm studied and cannot be released by the authors. Address for correspondence: Caren Schelleman, Maastricht University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, MARC, PO Box 616, 6200 MD MAASTRICHT, The Netherlands. Phone: ++31.43.388.37.14. Fax: ++31.43.388.48.76. E-mail: [email protected] ;