Audit Expectation Gap and Decision Performance of Iranian Loan Officers

External users of financial statements such as bank loan officers may have a greater reliance on audited financial statements in their decision-making due to their higher expectation of auditors' role and responsibility as compared to what is prescribed in statutes and thus, giving rise to an audit expectation gap. The existence of an audit expectation gap may cause loan officers to make poorer assessment of the credit worthiness of loan applicants that may result in their banks experiencing higher non-performing loans. This study proposes to examine the effects of individual factors on the extent of audit expectation gap and whether audit expectation gap would adversely affect loan officer decision performance. This study hypothesises that three individual factors, level of accounting qualification, accounting experience and occupation experience, to affect loan officer's perception of the role of audit and the reliability of the audited financial statements. A questionnaire was designed based on measures used in previous studies to evaluate the extent of the audit expectation gap with respect to perceived auditors' responsibility, reliability and decision-usefulness of audit financial statements. Based on the feedback of senior bank mangers of Iranian banks, this study used four indicators to measure the decision performance of loan officers, and the indicators were a) the percentage of non-performing loans, including bad and doubtful loans, b) the percentage of loans that failed to repay in the first 3 installments, c) the percentage of loans that failed to repay in more than 3 installments and, d) the percentage of loans rejected by loan officer's supervisor. Out of the1 13 questionnaires that were distributed to loan officers at the main branches of the five biggest commercial banks in Iran (Melli, Mellat, Saderat, Tejarat and Sepah), 11 1 questionnaires were completed and returned. Linear and multiple regression analyses indicate that accounting qualification and accounting experience have a significant and negative relationship with audit expectation gap. However, there is no significant relationship between occupational experience and audit expectation gap, but the direction of the relationship is as expected. Except for the rejected loans indicator, the results for all the other three performance indicators indicate significant and negative relationships between the loan officers' decision performance and the extent of the audit expectation gap

Audit expectation gap and loan decision performance of bank officers in Iran

This study examines the effect of accounting knowledge and experiences of Iranian bank officers on the audit expectation gap, and investigates whether the gap mediates (or explains) the individual factor-loan decision performance relationship. Copies of a structured questionnaire were distributed to 113 loan officers from five large commercial banks in Iran and responses of 111 bank officers were analysed. The results show the existence of a fairly large audit expectation gap among the Iranian bank loan officers, and accounting knowledge was found to significantly mitigate the extent of the gap. More importantly, this study found a highly significant negative relationship between the audit expectation gap and loan decision performance of the Iranian bank officers. Further analyses indicate that the audit expectation gap fully mediates the individual knowledge-performance relationship. The findings of this study have important policy implications for recruitment and training of the bank officers

The Translator-text Interaction Based on Gadamer’s Theory of Fusion of Horizons: A Case Study of Translations of Romantic Poetry into Persian

Love of poetry has a long history among Iranians, so is the case with translation of poetry in their recent attempts. Thus, the significant number of translations has been made from Western poems. British Romantic poetry,as one type of Western poetry, has been translated since the beginning of poetry translation in Iran. This paper aims to investigate the translations of the British Romantic poems diachronically, the translations published in the 20th century, before the Revolution of 1979, and synchronically, the Romantic poems translated in the 21st century, the post-Revolutionary period. To fulfill the purpose, Schäffner’s theory of translation competences was applied to reveal which century met them more adeptly. For the linguistic competence, besides the text analysis of all translations, the number of the parts of speech of four translations attributed to a poem was counted and compared to the number of the original poem to verify the result. The analysis of the competences, as one of the tools of translation assessment, proves the attainment of Gadamer’s theory on the fusion of horizons for translators. The examination indicates that the translation competences are more developed in the translations of the 21st century. Therefore, in this century, translators achieve the fusion of horizons more effectively and the translation trend of British Romantic poetry has improved.El amor por la poesía tiene una larga historia entre los iraníes, y lo mismo ocurre recientemente con la traducción de poesía. Como ejemplo de ello observamos el número tan significativo de traducciones se han realizado a partir de poemas occidentales. La poesía romántica británica, como tipo de poesía occidental, ha sido traducida desde los inicios de la traducción poética en Irán. Este trabajo investiga las traducciones de los poemas románticos británicos de forma diacrónica, las traducciones publicadas en el siglo XX antes de la Revolución de 1979, y de forma sincrónica, los poemas románticos traducidos en el siglo XXI, el periodo posrevolucionario. Para ello, se aplicó la teoría de las competencias traductoras de Schäffner, con el fin de revelar qué siglo las cumplía mejor. Para la competencia lingüística, además del análisis del texto de todas las traducciones, se contó el número de las partes de la oración de cuatro traducciones atribuidas a un poema y se comparó con el número del poema original para verificar el resultado. El análisis de las competencias, como una de las herramientas de evaluación de la traducción, demuestra la consecución de la teoría de Gadamer sobre la fusión de horizontes para los traductores. Este estudio indica que las competencias de traducción están más desarrolladas en las traducciones del siglo XXI. Por lo tanto, en este siglo, los traductores logran la fusión de horizontes con mayor eficacia, y la tendencia de la traducción de la poesía romántica británica ha mejorado

Investigating the Relationship between Expectations Gap from Attitude of Accreditation of Audit Report by Credit Experts and Non-repayment of Granted Facilities in the Branches of Keshavarzi Bank of Iran

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between expectations gap from attitude of accreditation of audit report by credit experts and non-repayment of granted facilities in the branches of Keshavarzi Bank of Iran. Considering that collection of debts shows the bank's position in society and the banking network and improve performance of management. Credit officers and experts of banks repeatedly for authentication to borrowers with accuracy in audit reports specially type of comment provided act to the credit assessment of the economic unites of applicant of facilities. The withdrawal of auditors from the accreditation role of independent auditors and withdrawal of users has a significant difference which provide assessments with different aspects to meet the expectations gap from it and in such a situation, experts and officials of credit part of the banks cannot resolve their critical task from society's expectations and this in turn will cause impact on the bank's claims. Results of the survey research are based on results of collecting 250 questionnaires from decision-makers and officials of paying credits in the banking system. In this regard, it is tried to measure this relation by using statistics and data collected in time period 2015. In this study, linear regression is used at 95% confidence level, according to the results, it was specified by increasing expectations gap from attitude of accreditation of audit report by credit experts, non-repayment of granted facilities increases that shows the direct relationship between the two variables. So a systematic and comprehensive program to be designed and implemented to reduce expectation gap from audit report by credit experts so that the ability to analyze audit report and financial statements related to report and correct understanding of the applicant's financial and credit position of facilities to be provided. Keywords: Attitude of Accreditation, Expectations Gap from Audit Report, Credit Experts, Granted Facilities JEL Classifications: C32; O13; O4

Effects of ownership structure and proprietary cost on forward looking information disclosure and its impact on firm performance

The focus of this study is to investigate the relationship between ownership structure, namely family ownership, institutional ownership, government ownership and diffused ownership, and the extent of forward looking information disclosure of public listed companies in Malaysia. The association between the proprietary cost of the firms and the extent of forward looking information disclosure is also examined. This study then examines whether the extent of forward looking information disclosure impacts firm market performance. This study used profitability and industry type as control variables. Content analysis was applied to measure the extent of forward looking information disclosure. The type of ownership structure was determined by the percentage of shares held by the top five share-holders. Relative market share was used as a proxy for proprietary cost. Finally, corporate market performance was measured by three indicators volatility of stock return, market liquidity ratio and Tobin’s Q. The sample consisted of 80 companies drawn from the 100 largest public-listed companies based on market capitalization at the end of 2009. Multiple regression analyses were carried out to examine the relationships among ownership structure, proprietary cost and the extent of voluntary disclosure of forward looking information. Simple linear regression was used to determine the relationship between the extent of forward looking information disclosure and firm market performance. The results show that among the ownership structure types, only family ownership has a significant negative effect on the extent of forward looking information disclosure. Although the proprietary cost significantly influences the extent of forward looking information disclosure, the direction is positive which is not as hypothesized. In addition, the extent of voluntary disclosure of forward looking information is positively related to the firm’s market performance. Empirical evidence provided in this study may be useful to practising managers. Corporate management may improve their firm’s market performance by disclosing more forward looking information about their future prospects. The result of this study may be also helpful to regulators in Malaysian capital market in formulating information disclosure policy to promote transparency and to improve quality of information disclosure in annual reports to enhance market confidence

Intellectual capital and forward looking information disclosures incentives and impacts on financial intermediaries and corporate performance

With the rapidly changing economic environment, the conventional financial statements are becoming less informative about the company’s current economic position and its future prospects. The current financial reporting framework cannot incorporate and report many intangible resources and future oriented information in the current corporate financial statements. These intangibles are often knowledgebased resources that create competitive advantage and are key drivers of success of organizations in the new era. Management of many proactive organizations voluntarily disclose their intellectual resources, as well as other pertinent forward looking information, in their annual reports to facilitate investors and other stakeholders to make better informed decisions. Such disclosures can attract more financial intermediaries in financial markets as well; as the results, the companies with higher intellectual and forward looking information disclosures may experience the better performance in the financial market.Most prior studies on voluntary information disclosures mainly focus on the relationship between the extent of voluntary information disclosure and corporate characteristics and corporate governance. However, this study examines how the economic disincentive/incentives (e.g. proprietary cost, growth opportunity and existence of stock based compensation plan) may affect the extent of voluntary information disclosure of both intellectual capital and forward looking information. This study also investigates whether the extent of financial intermediary following plays a significant role in explaining the relationship between the extent of voluntary information disclosure and corporate market performance in Malaysia. The required secondary data were obtained from the corporate 2010 annual reports and the S&P Capital IQ database related to 2010. Based on all pubic listed companies in Malaysian stock market, only 198 companies have available data required for this study. Some of this data include number of financial intermediary following and data on market performance. The regression results show that a firm’s growth opportunity is positively and significantly related to the extent of voluntary information disclosure. Although, significant relationship existed between stock option compensation plan and voluntary information disclosure, as well as between proprietary cost and voluntary information disclosure, the directions of these relationships are not as hypothesised. In addition, the findings of current study provide the empirical evidence that the voluntary disclosure-performance relationship is mediated by the extent of financial intermediary following. This study enhances understanding of the rationale for corporate voluntary disclosure policies on intellectual and forward looking information. More importantly, this study shows the important role that financial intermediaries plays in disseminating of such relevant information in the capital market that subsequently influences corporate market performance, the results also help to explain the mixed findings regarding the effects of voluntary disclosures on corporate performance. The findings would be of interests to practitioners such as investors and corporate managers as well as academic researchers

La interacción traductor-texto basada en la teoría de la fusión de horizontes de Gadamer: Un estudio de caso de las traducciones de la poesía romántica al persa

Love of poetry has a long history among Iranians, so is the case with translation of poetry in their recent attempts. Thus, the significant number of translations has been made from Western poems. British Romantic poetry, as one type of Western poetry, has been translated since the beginning of poetry translation in Iran. This paper aims to investigate the translations of the British Romantic poems diachronically, the translations published in the 20th century, before the Revolution of 1979, and synchronically, the Romantic poems translated in the 21st century, the post-Revolutionary period. To fulfill the purpose, Schäffner’s theory of translation competences was applied to reveal which century met them more adeptly. For the linguistic competence, besides the text analysis of all translations, the number of the parts of speech of four translations attributed to a poem was counted and compared to the number of the original poem to verify the result. The analysis of the competences, as one of the tools of translation assessment, proves the attainment of Gadamer’s theory on the fusion of horizons for translators. The examination indicates that the translation competences are more developed in the translations of the 21st century. Therefore, in this century, translators achieve the fusion of horizons more effectively, and the translation trend of British Romantic poetry has improved. Keywords: Poetry translation, British Romantic poetry, Translation competence, Fusion of horizons, Persian literature, The Revolution of 1979.El amor por la poesía tiene una larga historia entre los iraníes, y lo mismo ocurre recientemente con la traducción de poesía. Como ejemplo de ello observamos el número tan significativo de traducciones se han realizado a partir de poemas occidentales. La poesía romántica británica, como tipo de poesía occidental, ha sido traducida desde los inicios de la traducción poética en Irán. Este trabajo investiga las traducciones de los poemas románticos británicos de forma diacrónica, las traducciones publicadas en el siglo XX antes de la Revolución de 1979, y de forma sincrónica, los poemas románticos traducidos en el siglo XXI, el periodo posrevolucionario. Para ello, se aplicó la teoría de las competencias traductoras de Schäffner, con el fin de revelar qué siglo las cumplía mejor. Para la competencia lingüística, además del análisis del texto de todas las traducciones, se contó el número de las partes de la oración de cuatro traducciones atribuidas a un poema y se comparó con el número del poema original para verificar el resultado. El análisis de las competencias, como una de las herramientas de evaluación de la traducción, demuestra la consecución de la teoría de Gadamer sobre la fusión de horizontes para los traductores. Este estudio indica que las competencias de traducción están más desarrolladas en las traducciones del siglo XXI. Por lo tanto, en este siglo, los traductores logran la fusión de horizontes con mayor eficacia, y la tendencia de la traducción de la poesía romántica británica ha mejorado.  Palabras clave: Traducción poética, Poesía británica romántica, Competencia traductora, Fusión de horizontes, Literatura Persa y la Revolución de 1979