The Effect of Felt Accountability on User Satisfaction with Accounting Information

Felt accountability affects an account-givers’ behavior, decisions, and organizational performance. Accounting information (AI) is provided for decision-making and accountability in the public sector. This study investigated the effects of felt accountability on expertise, legitimacy, and AI disclosure level for accountability on users’ satisfaction. Survey data included 401 responses across public institutions in Vietnam, and SEM linear structure analysis was used to examine the results. The research findings indicate that felt accountability directly affects users’ satisfaction and their expertise and legitimacy, and the level of AI disclosure. The expertise and legitimacy of the account-holder and the level of AI disclosure partially mediate the relationship between felt accountability and users’ satisfaction. This implies that AI's needs, purposes, and importance are determined based on hypothetical users that are not useful in reality. In practice, AI must meet accountability requirements to bring satisfaction to users. The satisfaction level of actual users of AI is influenced by the account-givers’ perceived accountability regarding the needs, expertise, and legitimacy of the account-holder. Therefore, it is essential to identify the type of information needed, the timing of AI disclosure, and the actual AI users to reduce the gap between the supply and demand of AI. The research results provide evidence supporting agency and social contingency theories in accountability relationships. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2024-08-02-023 Full Text: PD

Textual Manifold-based Defense Against Natural Language Adversarial Examples

Recent studies on adversarial images have shown that they tend to leave the underlying low-dimensional data manifold, making them significantly more challenging for current models to make correct predictions. This so-called off-manifold conjecture has inspired a novel line of defenses against adversarial attacks on images. In this study, we find a similar phenomenon occurs in the contextualized embedding space induced by pretrained language models, in which adversarial texts tend to have their embeddings diverge from the manifold of natural ones. Based on this finding, we propose Textual Manifold-based Defense (TMD), a defense mechanism that projects text embeddings onto an approximated embedding manifold before classification. It reduces the complexity of potential adversarial examples, which ultimately enhances the robustness of the protected model. Through extensive experiments, our method consistently and significantly outperforms previous defenses under various attack settings without trading off clean accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first NLP defense that leverages the manifold structure against adversarial attacks. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/dangne/tmd}

The Organizational Culture Strategy SMEs During Economic Crises

The importance of organizational culture in the operation and performance of businesses has been widely acknowledged, but there is inconsistency in findings about the impact of culture on organizational performance across studies. This study aimed to achieve two objectives: first, to establish the relationship between the quality of accounting information systems (AIS), organizational culture, and the financial performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam; and second, to survey the organizational culture strategy of Vietnamese SMEs in the context of economic crises. The study survey was conducted in May 2023 and involved 242 SMEs in Vietnam. The research model was tested using Smart PLS. The results suggest that AIS has a positive relationship with both organizational culture and the financial performance of SMEs. However, organizational culture only affects financial performance related to organizational adaptability during a crisis. Moreover, a flexible, external adaptation, and balanced cultural approach strategy has a significant impact on the financial performance of SMEs. During a crisis, managers expect employees to adapt in order to achieve strategic goals and plans while simultaneously balancing stability, engagement, and employee satisfaction to achieve organizational effectiveness. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2023-07-06-015 Full Text: PD

The Influence of Factors on the Demand for Performance Auditing in the Public Sector

Performance audits (PA) are becoming essential in supreme audit institutions (SAIs). This study aims to explain why developing countries need to expand the function of PA and to explore and measure the impact of each factor on the need to develop PA in Vietnam. The research combines qualitative (group discussion) and quantitative methods by surveying 157 state auditors of the State Audit of Vietnam (SAV). Data is processed through SmartPLS 4.0.8.5 to verify the measurement and linear structure models. The results of the statistical analysis also show that all three factors have an impact on the development of PA, including (i) the degree of public governance reform, (ii) the accountability of SAV, and (iii) occupational influence. Besides, the model test results show that, from the perspective of SAV, the need to improve performance is higher than accountability. Public governance reform factors, external support, and SAI accountability contribute to enhancing the value of PA. The findings of this study complement the audit theory on three fronts: (i) PA will become more important when pursuing the goal of increasing accountability rather than improving performance; (ii) PA continues to evolve to adapt to social changes; and (iii) additional empirical evidence demonstrating that countries with low levels of transparency and accountability and inconsistent legal systems have higher audit “demand” but low supply of PA. This study proposes a PA development model to: (i) forecast the ability and level of the development audit of each SAI; and (ii) contribute to enhancing the value of PA using the PA topic selection tool. In addition, the developed scale is tested to ensure its reliability and validity. So this scale can be used to survey the needs, feasibility, and expected value that each audit subject brings before and after implementation. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2024-08-01-07 Full Text: PD

Approximation of mild solutions of the linear and nonlinear elliptic equations

In this paper, we investigate the Cauchy problem for both linear and semi-linear elliptic equations. In general, the equations have the form $$\frac{\partial^{2}}{\partial t^{2}}u\left(t\right)=\mathcal{A}u\left(t\right)+f\left(t,u\left(t\right)\right),\quad t\in\left[0,T\right],$$ where $\mathcal{A}$ is a positive-definite, self-adjoint operator with compact inverse. As we know, these problems are well-known to be ill-posed. On account of the orthonormal eigenbasis and the corresponding eigenvalues related to the operator, the method of separation of variables is used to show the solution in series representation. Thereby, we propose a modified method and show error estimations in many accepted cases. For illustration, two numerical examples, a modified Helmholtz equation and an elliptic sine-Gordon equation, are constructed to demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method.Comment: 29 pages, 16 figures, July 201

Application of monte carlo simulation method to estimate the reliability of design problem of the bored pile according to limited state

This paper applies Monte Carlo simulation method to estimate the reliability of bored pile for designing problem at “Tax Office of Phu Nhuan District”. Surveyed random variables are physico-mechanical properties of soil and loads are assumed that they follow the normal distribution. Limit state functions developed from design requirements of Ultimate limit state (ULS) and Serviceability limit state (SLS). Results show that the probability of failure is 0 and the reliability index of ULS is 9.493 and of SLS is 37.076 when examining coefficient of variation of soil and loads of 10%. The paper also considers the safety level when evaluating different coefficients of variation in the range of 10 ~30%. The authors suggest applying the reliability method to design calculation for other construction to help the engineers have a visual perspective, increase safety and avoid wastage