Fair Value Accounting and Loan Loss Provisioning- Early Evidence from Nigerian Banking Industry

The purpose of this study is to investigate the Loan Loss Provisioning under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and Nigerian Prudential Guidelines. The audited first time annual reports of four Nigerian banks were analysed.  Simple percentages and tables were used to determine the relationships between the figures thrown out by the two provisioning models. We found that prudential guidelines provisions were more aggressive and higher in all cases than IFRS provisions. In other words, the profit figures under prudential guideline model were more conservative than the corresponding figures under the IFRS model. The result of the study was based on 1 year 2012 audited first time IFRS accounts of 4 Nigerian banks and therefore cannot be generalised but regarded as rather indicative of the differences between the two models. The paper has practical implications for Nigerian regulatory authorities and in particular the CBN who may wish to retain its Loan Loss Provisioning Model or transmute to the IFRS model. This is about the first study on Nigerian banks on this subject matter post mandatory adoption of IFRS in 2012 and, has added to our knowledge of IFRS Loan Loss Provisioning compared to the Nigerian Prudential guideline model. Key Words: IFRS, Fair value, Prudential Guidelines, Loan Loss, Early Evidence

Drivers of Audit Failure in Nigeria- Evidence from Cadbury (Nigeria) PLC.

This study is an investigation of audit failure factors in Nigeria’s corporate governance firmament. An explanatory case study approach was adopted for the study supplemented by archival data and newspaper reports. An explanation was sought for the findings of the regulatory authority that the auditor in this case was not only negligent and incompetent but also did not demonstrate sufficient Professional skepticism. One of our findings is the fact that the auditors may have stayed for too long on the job and had thus impaired their independence. Provision of non- accounting services to this particular audit client was also fingered as a cause of the audit failure. We recommend mandatory rotation of auditors and prohibition of provision of non- audit services to audit clients among others. One limitation, though, of our study is that it is a single case study and may not be generalised. KEY WORDS: Audit Failure, Cadbury (Nig.) Plc, Professional Skepticism, Negligence

Environmental Cost Accounting and Cost Allocation (a Study of Selected Manufacturing Companies in Nigeria)

The major objective of this paper is to determine the extent to which Nigerian firms have embraced environmental cost accounting in cost allocation.  This research adopted a research survey and the main research instrument is the questionnaire. 105 Accountants from twenty-five (25) quoted manufacturing companies were the respondents for this research. The mean, standard deviation and simple percentages were used to analyze the questions while the ANOVA was used to statistically analyze the differences between means. Findings show that majority of the firms have not embraced environmental cost accounting, they still lump all indirect costs under overhead and use mostly, one absorption method which may not have any relationship with the indirect costs to apportion these costs into the product costs. The identified commonest method of overhead allocation basis is the material use. Although the treatments given to environmental costs were conventional in nature, significant differences exist among firms on the method of allocating environmental costs to products/processes. Environmental accounting can be said to be in embryonic stage in the manufacturing firms in Nigeria. This paper offers a valuable insight into the environmental cost accounting practices of Nigerian manufacturing firms. This paper will help firms to understand what environmental cost accounting is all about and how to embrace it. Keywords: Environmental accounting, Environmental cost accounting, environmental costs, conventional system

Preserving accuracy in GenBank

GenBank, the public repository for nucleotide and protein sequences, is a critical resource for molecular biology, evolutionary biology, and ecology. While some attention has been drawn to sequence errors (1), common annotation errors also reduce the value of this database. In fact, for organisms such as fungi, which are notoriously difficult to identify, up to 20% of DNA sequence records may have erroneous lineage designations in GenBank (2). Gene function annotation in protein sequence databases is similarly error-prone (3, 4). Because identity and function of new sequences are often determined by bioinformatic analyses, both types of errors are propagated into new accessions, leading to long-term degradation of the quality of the database. Currently, primary sequence data are annotated by the authors of those data, and can only be reannotated by the same authors. This is inefficient and unsustainable over the long term as authors eventually leave the field. Although it is possible to link third-party databases to GenBank records, this is a short-term solution that has little guarantee of permanence. Similarly, the current third-party annotation option in GenBank (TPA) complicates rather than solves the problem by creating an identical record with a new annotation, while leaving the original record unflagged and unlinked to the new record. Since the origin of public zoological and botanical specimen collections, an open system of cumulative annotation has evolved, whereby the original name is retained, but additional opinion is directly appended and used for filing and retrieval. This was needed as new specimens and analyses allowed for reevaluation of older specimens and the original depositors became unavailable. The time has come for the public sequence database to incorporate a community-curated, cumulative annotation process that allows third parties to improve the annotations of sequences when warranted by published peer-reviewed analyses (5).(undefined