The costs of poor data quality

Purpose: The technological developments have implied that companies store increasingly more data. However, data quality maintenance work is often neglected, and poor quality business data constitute a significant cost factor for many companies. This paper argues that perfect data quality should not be the goal, but instead the data quality should be improved to only a certain level. The paper focuses on how to identify the optimal data quality level. Design/methodology/approach: The paper starts with a review of data quality literature. On this basis, the paper proposes a definition of the optimal data maintenance effort and a classification of costs inflicted by poor quality data. These propositions are investigated by a case study. Findings: The paper proposes: (1) a definition of the optimal data maintenance effort and (2) a classification of costs inflicted by poor quality data. A case study illustrates the usefulness of these propositions. Research limitations/implications: The paper provides definitions in relation to the costs of poor quality data and the data quality maintenance effort. Future research may build on these definitions. To further develop the contributions of the paper, more studies are needed. Practical implications: As illustrated by the case study, the definitions provided by this paper can be used for determining the right data maintenance effort and costs inflicted by poor quality data. In many companies, such insights may lead to significant savings. Originality/value: The paper provides a clarification of what are the costs of poor quality data and defines the relation to data quality maintenance effort. This represents an original contribution of value to future research and practice.Peer Reviewe

Linking Corporate Institutional Logics and Moral Reasoning – Evidence from Large Danish Audit Firms

This paper examines whether organizational levels of owner/partner, CPA manager, supervisor and other audit staff are associated with institutional logics of auditors in large Danish audit firms. Our findings identify the presence of the professional logic and commercial logic with the professional logic being two explicit logics of a fiduciary and a technical-expertise logic. The organizational levels of CPA manager, supervisor and other staff are significant in explaining the presence of the technicalexpertise logic, but not the fiduciary logic. Higher moral reasoning of auditors and being a female are significantly associated with the presence of the fiduciary logic. All four organizational levels are significant in explaining the identified commercial logic with further tests indicating that partners place more emphasis than supervisors on the commercial logic. Additional tests examine whether moral reasoning is associated with the professional fiduciary, professional technical-expertise and commercial logics and whether organizational levels explain moral reasoning. We find that a higher professional fiduciary logic is associated with higher auditor moral reasoning. In contrast, lower moral reasoning is associated with higher professional technical-expertise and commercial logics. In addition, increased audit experience is associated with lower moral reasoning.</p

Knowledge Activation in Auditors’ Materiality Judgments:An Institutional Logics Perspective

A good muon momentum resolution in the region from hundreds of GeV to several TeV is crucial for searches for new physics, such as $W$' → $\mu$$ν$ and $Z$' → $\mu\mu$ (ATLAS Collaboration, Phys. Lett. B, 796 (2019) 68) at the LHC. A new physics signal in one of these channels could manifest itself as an excess over the Standard Model (SM) prediction in the form of a handful of muon candidates in the high-end tail of the transverse mass or invariant mass distribution. It is therefore important to reject poorly measured muons, where the reconstructed $_{pT}$ is much higher than the true value, to avoid the contamination of the highmass region with events migrating from lower masses. The ability to reconstruct high-momentum muon tracks in ATLAS with good momentum resolution is closely connected to a good understanding of the ATLAS tracking detectors alignment and of the related uncertainties. This contribution provides an overview of the method used in muon reconstruction to account for the differences in position and orientation of the various detector elements, between the geometry used in simulation and the real position of the detector

El valor razonable y la conexión perdida entre contabilidad y auditoría

Se pretende argumentar que la relación entre contabilidad y auditoría se ha perdido porque los supuestos filosóficos básicos de la auditoría no se han desarrollado tanto como sus correspondientes en el campo de la contabilidad. En tanto que la contabilidad a valor razonable representa una realidad socialmente construida, la auditoría parece siempre estar fundada en la tradición positivista de la teoría de la evidencia (Cfr. Mautz y Sharaf, 1961; AAA, 1973; Flint, 1988). El resto del trabajo se focaliza en el análisis del problema de la relación perdida entre contabilidad y auditoría, problema que se ha planteado en la sección primera (status quæstionis). En primer lugar, la siguiente sección describirá brevemente la metodología utilizada para el análisis. En la tercera sección se dará una breve descripción del cambio histórico del paradigma principal de la contabilidad, que pasa de informar la verdad a informar en coherencia con los principios de contabilidad generalmente aceptados (PCGA) y los cambios correspondientes en el paradigma principal de la auditoría, desde los tiempos antiguos hasta la auditoría moderna en el siglo XIX, que culminó con la promulgación de ASOBAC. En la cuarta sección, se analizan los avances de la última o dos últimas décadas, más concretamente, el cambio de un enfoque contable basado en la correspondencia con criterios, a un enfoque contable basado en la construcción social de consenso, como puede constatarse en el giro contable a partir de la década de 1990 en adelante con el paradigma del valor razonable. Se argumentará que la auditoría no se ha modificado en consecuencia, y que este eslabón perdido entre el enfoque ontológico de la contabilidad y de la auditoría puede acarrear problemas a los académicos, emisores de normas y profesionales. El artículo concluye con estas implicaciones y la necesidad de investigación futura