Corporate Governance in Jordan: Role of the External

In our globalized world, competition for capital is intense and only jurisdictions with superior corporate governance will attract the FDI crucial for economic growth and development. The goal of this chapter is to assess the legal regime of external auditors – as opposed to internal auditors - per Company Legislation of 1997 and provide suggestions for improvement in the current legal regime.34 Part II discusses global trends in corporate governance with respect to the role of the external auditor. Part III of the chapter provides an overview of the development of the auditing profession in Jordan. In Part IV, the chapter analyzes in detail the specific provisions related to auditors in the Company Legislation of 1997. The part also points out various shortcomings and inconsistencies between rights and duties of auditors and makes suggested proposals for amending the current law

Hypotheses, evidence and relationships: The HypER approach for representing scientific knowledge claims

Biological knowledge is increasingly represented as a collection of (entity-relationship-entity) triplets. These are queried, mined, appended to papers, and published. However, this representation ignores the argumentation contained within a paper and the relationships between hypotheses, claims and evidence put forth in the article. In this paper, we propose an alternate view of the research article as a network of 'hypotheses and evidence'. Our knowledge representation focuses on scientific discourse as a rhetorical activity, which leads to a different direction in the development of tools and processes for modeling this discourse. We propose to extract knowledge from the article to allow the construction of a system where a specific scientific claim is connected, through trails of meaningful relationships, to experimental evidence. We discuss some current efforts and future plans in this area

ROMANIAN COMPANIES’ WEB-BASED DISCLOSURE CHOICES AND CAPITAL MARKETS

This article aims to investigate the web-based disclosure choices andpractices among Romanian companies listed on Bucharest Stock Exchange. Web-based disclosure offers advantages that are absent in paper-based voluntarydisclosure: it can be accessed globally at much lower costs and it can be updatedmuch more timely also at much lower costs. Another goal of the paper is to establishthe criteria in order to select properly the sample companies. After presenting theadvantages and eventual risks of Internet Financial Reporting and analyzing previousinvestigative reports and articles, this paper investigates the degree to whichRomanian listed companies to disclose financial and non-financial information areusing the Internet. The web sites of these companies were examined throughout May2007 to May 2008, with a view to determining which companies present voluntaryfinancial or non-financial data in addition to the Annual Report and Accounts.internet financial reporting, mandatory and voluntary disclosure, capital markets,listed companies

Online consultation on experts’ views on digital competence

The objective of this investigation was to provide another perspective on what it means to be digitally competent today, in addition to reviews of literature and current frameworks for the development of digital competence, 5 all of which constitute part of the wider IPTS Digital Competence Project (DIGCOMP). Some common ground exists at a general level in defining digital competence in terms of knowledge, skills, and attitudes, which may be hierarchically organised. However, this does not provide the clarity needed by teachers, employers, citizens – all those who are responsible for digital competence development, be it their own or other people’s ‐ to make informed decisions. Further work is needed to create a common language that helps to enhance understanding across the worlds of research, education, training, and work. This will make it easier for citizens and employers to see what digital competence entails and how it is relevant to their jobs and more generally, their lives

Enforced Standards Versus Evolution by General Acceptance

Conventions as well as standards influence the practice of financial reporting. Financial reporting standards arise as legislated rules, enforced by the power of law. Conventions evolve over time through trial and practice, and are upheld by socioeconomic rewards and sanctions. Financial reporting in the second half of the twentieth century has been characterized by a preference for legislated standards, and a distinct lack of faith in its evolution as a body of social conventions. Evidence on whether this faith in standards over conventions is justified remains to be marshaled. We present data on privacy practices in e-commerce under the European Union's (EU's) formal regulatory regime prevailing in the United Kingdom (U.K.), and compare it to the data from a previous study of United States (U.S.) practices that evolved in the absence of government laws or enforcement.The codification by the EU law, and the enforcement by the U.K. government, improves neither the disclosure nor the practice of e-commerce privacy relative to the U.S.On the contrary, some evidence shows the unregulated practices in U.S. to be superior. Regulation in the U.K. also appears to stifle development of a market for web assurance services. Both U.S. and U.K. consumers continue to be vulnerable to a small number of e-commerce websites who spam their customers, ignoring the latter's expressed or implied preferences. We explore the implications of these results for understanding the merits of enforced standards and conventions in the domain of financial reporting.

Disagreeable Privacy Policies: Mismatches between Meaning and Users’ Understanding

Privacy policies are verbose, difficult to understand, take too long to read, and may be the least-read items on most websites even as users express growing concerns about information collection practices. For all their faults, though, privacy policies remain the single most important source of information for users to attempt to learn how companies collect, use, and share data. Likewise, these policies form the basis for the self-regulatory notice and choice framework that is designed and promoted as a replacement for regulation. The underlying value and legitimacy of notice and choice depends, however, on the ability of users to understand privacy policies. This paper investigates the differences in interpretation among expert, knowledgeable, and typical users and explores whether those groups can understand the practices described in privacy policies at a level sufficient to support rational decision-making. The paper seeks to fill an important gap in the understanding of privacy policies through primary research on user interpretation and to inform the development of technologies combining natural language processing, machine learning and crowdsourcing for policy interpretation and summarization. For this research, we recruited a group of law and public policy graduate students at Fordham University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh (“knowledgeable users”) and presented these law and policy researchers with a set of privacy policies from companies in the e-commerce and news & entertainment industries. We asked them nine basic questions about the policies’ statements regarding data collection, data use, and retention. We then presented the same set of policies to a group of privacy experts and to a group of non-expert users. The findings show areas of common understanding across all groups for certain data collection and deletion practices, but also demonstrate very important discrepancies in the interpretation of privacy policy language, particularly with respect to data sharing. The discordant interpretations arose both within groups and between the experts and the two other groups. The presence of these significant discrepancies has critical implications. First, the common understandings of some attributes of described data practices mean that semi-automated extraction of meaning from website privacy policies may be able to assist typical users and improve the effectiveness of notice by conveying the true meaning to users. However, the disagreements among experts and disagreement between experts and the other groups reflect that ambiguous wording in typical privacy policies undermines the ability of privacy policies to effectively convey notice of data practices to the general public. The results of this research will, consequently, have significant policy implications for the construction of the notice and choice framework and for the US reliance on this approach. The gap in interpretation indicates that privacy policies may be misleading the general public and that those policies could be considered legally unfair and deceptive. And, where websites are not effectively conveying privacy policies to consumers in a way that a “reasonable person” could, in fact, understand the policies, “notice and choice” fails as a framework. Such a failure has broad international implications since websites extend their reach beyond the United States