The Impact Of Sarbanes-Oxley Act

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) was signed into law in July 2002, with the express purpose of restoring public confidence in corporate financial statements. Prior to the enactment of Sox, investors suffered significant losses due to corporate failures brought on by financial malfeasance.&nbsp

Goodwill Impairment: A New Window For Earnings Management?

The Financial Accounting Standards Board promulgated standard No. 142 in an attempt to improve the understandability of accounting information.  This new rule eliminated the practice of automatically amortizing goodwill.  No. 142 requires public companies to test goodwill for possible impairment at least annually.  An unintended consequence of this new standard is the opportunity for companies to use it in earnings management.  To test the possibility that the rule is being used for this purpose, a sample of companies was chosen, all of which had amounts of goodwill on their balance sheet during the 2003-2005 interval.  The results reveal that the number of companies experiencing losses or low rates of return on total assets who actually impaired goodwill was statistically insignificant during the period under consideration.  Thus, the results strongly suggest that companies are using No. 142 in an attempt to manage the volatility of earnings. &nbsp

Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing Systems for Marketing Decisions

The activity-based costing (ABC) systems emerged as a management accounting innovation in the mid-1980s in response to dissatisfaction with traditional management accounting techniques and heightened international competition. Although ABC provides many advantages for managerial decision making, ABC tends to be outdated due to its limitations and is substituted by the time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) systems. TDABC requires estimates of only two parameters: how much it costs per time unit of capacity to supply resources to activities and how much time it takes to perform each activity. TDABC allows incorporation of variation in the time demands made by different types of processes and consequently the representation of all possible combinations of activities that a process performs. This paper uses TDABC to calculate marketing costs and describes TDABC as a useful technique to reduce marketing resource costs and to support effective marketing decision making in various contexts such as marketing processes restructuring, marketing mix choices, customer profitability and price differentiation for customer classes

Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing Systems for Marketing Decisions

© 2019 Yonpae Park et al., published by Sciendo 2019. The activity-based costing (ABC) systems emerged as a management accounting innovation in the mid-1980s in response to dissatisfaction with traditional management accounting techniques and heightened international competition. Although ABC provides many advantages for managerial decision making, ABC tends to be outdated due to its limitations and is substituted by the time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) systems. TDABC requires estimates of only two parameters: how much it costs per time unit of capacity to supply resources to activities and how much time it takes to perform each activity. TDABC allows incorporation of variation in the time demands made by different types of processes and consequently the representation of all possible combinations of activities that a process performs. This paper uses TDABC to calculate marketing costs and describes TDABC as a useful technique to reduce marketing resource costs and to support effective marketing decision making in various contexts such as marketing processes restructuring, marketing mix choices, customer profitability and price differentiation for customer classes

Functional and Radiological Results of Proximal Femoral Nail Antirotation (PFNA) Osteosynthesis in the Treatment of Unstable Pertrochanteric Fractures

Pertrochanteric femur fractures are considered amongst the most commonly encountered fractures in the geriatric age group. We evaluated radiographic and functional outcomes of patients with unstable pertrochanteric fractures treated with the proximal femur nail antirotation (PFNA). Between March 2013 and December 2015, fifty patients (28 male and 22 females with a mean age of 72.8 years (range, 20–94)) with unstable pertrochanteric fractures (AO 31.A2 and 31.A3) were fixed with the PFNA at our institution, and they were retrospectively evaluated. Forty one patients were treated with short PFNA and nine with long PFNA. Operative time ranged between 30 and 150 (average 73.60) min, blood loss ranged between 50 and 250 (average 80) milliliter and hospital stay ranged between 3 and 18 (6.86) days. The mean follow-up period was 18 months (range, 11–31). At final follow-up, solid union of all fractures had been achieved without any implant-related complications, the mean Harris Hip Score (HHS) was 79.34 ± 9.10 points and the mean neck-shaft angle was 127.2° ± 5.07°. No significant differences were encountered between the functional and radiographic outcomes of the PFNA with regards to the AO fracture classification and the implant version. PFNA is a recommended option for the treatment of unstable pertrochanteric fractures owing to its easy insertion, reduced blood loss, stable fixation and satisfactory functional and radiological outcomes