DO ACCOUNTING AND FINANCE TOOLS SERVE GOVERNANCE?

A brief review of recent literature on corporate governance is provided, which is then concluded with a proposed corporate governance framework as a starting point for further development. We propose that it is stakeholder concentration that determines the quality of corporate governance. Next objective of this paper is the more ambitious one of addressing the role of accounting and finance disciplines to serve corporate governance. We test empirically if the use of some accounting and finance tools would have alerted management, auditors and regulators as well as investors to the impending collapse of failed firms ahead of time. If performance deterioration is not verifiable by using such acclaimed tools of these disciplines, then the advocacy of these disciplines is untenable and their contribution is overstated. Careful application of accounting-cum-finance tools, it appears, would have pre-identified the financial weakening of troubled firms, well ahead of time to catastrophic failures.

Deconstructing the immunopathogenesis of lung infections

Champa Ratnatunga studied the immune system of patients who developed non tuberculous mycobacterial infections. She found that each risk group and each infecting species had specific immune problems associated with infection. The pattern of this immune dysfunction helps to understand the disease and is being used to develop new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies

A Marketing Approach To Service Quality In Accounting: A Case Study

Accounting firms operate in a competitive marketplace, consequently the quality imperatives and philosophies that currently apply to manufacturing are also relevant to service industries like professional accounting services.  This begs the question of how quality should be defined and what pedagogy should be used for achieving the goal of continuous quality improvement.  The service quality concepts are of particular relevance to management accounting due to its involvement in quality assurance in manufacturing.  This paper looks at some of the research and methodologies developed by Marketing Science that takes a customer perceptive in defining and measuring service quality, and applies one such methodology, SERVPERF, to a firm in the Accounting and Management Consulting industry.  In this study, data representing customer service quality (performance) perceptions and satisfaction with the services provided by the firm has been used to identify areas needing improvement. The study also identifies those areas in which the firm is effective in providing services. The results of this analysis appear to provide some support for conceptualising and measuring service quality as an attitude as suggested by Cronin and Taylor (1992)

The Valuation And Reporting Of Reputation Risk Management Capability

The Financial Statements prepared and audited in today’s economic environment can be traced to the industrial era, when tangible assets such as machinery were the engines of growth. In this era, financial accountants endorsed or invented rules based on the historical cost doctrine that yielded values which had no counterparts in commercial reality – often book valuations were sheer fictions, and thus managing the risk associated with those valuations became a meaningless exercise. This was especially the case when intangible assets such as an organisation’s Brand Equity and Reputation were kept off the Balance Sheet, thus making the valuations even more fictitious. This has resulted today in knowledge-economy companies reporting book values widely divergent of market values. These fictitious financial reports were then audited, and the auditors were paid well by the preparers of the statements to hold that the statements gave a true and fair view of the state of affairs of the company. When some of these companies failed spectacularly due to the mismatch between commercial reality and reported values, the reason for failure was pinpointed to the irreparable damage to the company’s reputation due to the lack of adequate risk management procedures, resulting in a failure traced to an organisation’s products, services, information systems or external auditors. Since the spectacular collapses of Enron and WorldCom in the international stage, many countries have introduced either mandatory or voluntary corporate governance procedures. In the USA, SOX 404 makes mandatory the reporting of all significant risks in a company’s annual reports, albeit outside of the financial statements, as an off-balance sheet item. This paper argues that the overriding reason for governance is ultimately the safeguarding of an organisation’s reputation, and that this requires an integrated approach where the ‘accountees’ (corporations), and its investors and regulators are provided with appropriate information by the ‘accountors’, i.e. the accounting profession. It also argues that although the current professional accounting standards result in financial statements that are not adequate for the proper governance, an integrated approach can be taken where reputation risk can not only be managed and valued; it can also be incorporated in these financial statements. The paper provides a valuation model based on the premise that risk management should not be based on what the organisation has, but instead what the organisation can do, i.e. its capability to manage and enhance its reputation in order to ultimately generate incremental future cash flow. It then suggests an approach that auditors can take to determine its strategic capability of sustaining and generating value via reputation enhancement. Finally, the paper considers the role of the Risk Manager, and how an empowered open-book approach to communicating and financial reporting can provide significant motivational benefits in risk reduction and reputation enhancement that ultimately result in increased value

The carbon economy and emissions reporting

Abstract not available

Do accounting and finance tools serve governance?

A brief review of recent literature on corporate governance is provided, which is then concluded with a proposed corporate governance framework as a starting point for further development. We propose that it is stakeholder concentration that determines the quality of corporate governance. Next objective of this paper is the more ambitious one of addressing the role of accounting and finance disciplines to serve corporate governance. We test empirically if the use of some accounting and finance tools would have alerted management, auditors and regulators as well as investors to the impending collapse of failed firms ahead of time. If performance deterioration is not verifiable by using such acclaimed tools of these disciplines, then the advocacy of these disciplines is untenable and their contribution is overstated. Careful application of accounting-cum-finance tools, it appears, would have pre-identified the financial weakening of troubled firms, well ahead of time to catastrophic failures

Cosmic Gravitational Shear from the HST Medium Deep Survey

We present a measurement of cosmic shear on scales ranging from 10\arcsec to 2\arcmin in 347 WFPC2 images of random fields. Our result is based on shapes measured via image fitting and on a simple statistical technique; careful calibration of each step allows us to quantify our systematic uncertainties and to measure the cosmic shear down to very small angular scales. The WFPC2 images provide a robust measurement of the cosmic shear signal decreasing from $5.2$ at 10\arcsec to $2.2$ at 130\arcsec .Comment: 4 pages 2 Postscript figures, uses emulateapj.cls Astrophysical Journal Letters, December 1, 200

A robust algorithm for sky background computation in CCD images

In this paper we present a non-interactive algorithm to estimate a representative value for the sky background on CCD images. The method we have devised uses the mode as a robust estimator of the background brightness in sub-windows distributed across the input frame. The presence of contaminating objects is detected through the study of the local intensity distribution function and the perturbed areas are rejected using a statistical criterion which was derived from numerical simulations. The technique has been extensively tested on a large amount of images and it is suitable for fully automatic processing of large data volumes. The implementation we discuss here has been optimized for the ESO-FORS1 instrument, but it can be easily generalized to all CCD imagers with a sufficiently large field of view. The algorithm has been successfully used for the UBVRI ESO-Paranal night sky brightness survey (Patat 2003).Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures; accepted for publication in A&A. Version with full resolution figures available at http://www.eso.org/~fpatat/science/skybright/paperI.ps.g

Student Preferences for Common or Unique Assignments: Some Early Evidence

Accounting assignments and homework exercises that use identical problem material for all students encourage plagiarism. Giving each individual student a unique assignment alleviates this problem, but raises other issues such as the lack of co-operative learning and grading parity. This paper examines students\u27 attitudes towards both common and unique accounting assignments. The results indicate that a large majority of students preferred the unique assignments and perceived getting a high grade on these assignments as more rewarding and reflective of higher learning than similar grades on common assignments. Attitudinal variables for the validity of grading, perceptions regarding plagiarism, and perceptions of the benefits of co-operative learning were also assessed