Efficient Transaction Processing for Short-Lived Transactions in the Cloud

The cloud, in the past few years, has become the preferred platform for hosting web applications. Many of these web applications store their data in a distributed cloud storage system, which greatly simplifies application development and provides increased availability and reliability. However, with increasing user demand for web applications, these cloud storage systems often become the performance bottleneck. To address the cloud's performance demands, many storage system features, such as strong consistency and transactional support, are often omitted in favour of performance. Nonetheless, transactions remain necessary to ensure data integrity and application correctness. In this thesis, we introduce CrossStitch, which is an efficient transaction processing framework for distributed key-value storage systems. CrossStitch supports general transactions, where transactions include both computation and key accesses. It is specifically optimized for short-lived transactions that are typical of cloud-deployed web applications. In CrossStitch, a transaction is partitioned into a series of components that form a transaction chain. These components are executed and the transaction is propagated along the storage servers instead of being executed on the application server. This chained structure, in which servers only communicate with their immediate neighbours, enables CrossStitch to implement a pipelined version of two-phase commit to ensure transactional atomicity. CrossStitch is able to eliminate a significant amount of setup overhead using this structure by executing the transaction and the atomic commit protocol concurrently. Therefore, CrossStitch provides low latency and efficient transactional support for cloud storage systems. Our evaluation demonstrates that CrossStitch is a scalable and efficient transaction processing framework for web transactions

Financial Sustainability Of Company Limited By Guarantee Charities In Malaysia

Charities of all sizes play an essential role in society and economy, and provide social care and education, and they are now increasingly viewed as critical contributors to economic growth and social infrastructure; they also represent a substantial employer and a provider of services. Yet, charity failure has been a problem that has been plaguing developed countries and developing alike. In Malaysia, it has been reported that charities have difficulties in raising donations due to the difficult economic climate. In view of the foregoing, the purpose of this study is to determine the current level of charity financial sustainability, and to discover the relationships amongst accountability, own income generation, revenue diversification, director tenure diversity, financial management capacity and organisation size, and how these relate to financial sustainability; the latter forms the theoretical framework of this study

A Systematic Literature Review on Tax Evasion: Insights and Future Research Agenda

Emerging research studies in the subject of tax evasion have selected a variety of factors to verify their influence on the intentional non-compliance behaviour (tax evasion). However, a holistic review of tax evasion covering global literatures remains elusive. Therefore, this paper intends to conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) to review the existing articles in the past 10 years, encapsulating 100 papers starting from 2010, in which Organisation for Economic Co-operation Development (OECD) established the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters in order to reduce tax evasion with the help of collaborated network. The review articulates those existing studies have limited their exploration within individual and economic related factors, but less focused on the other variables such as digitalization of public services, corporate social responsibility, and whistleblowing efforts. This paper also exhibits the avenues for future researchers in the subject of tax evasion

HOW SOCIAL FACTOR DETERMINE INDIVIDUAL TAXPAYERS’ TAX COMPLIANCE BEHAVIOUR IN MALAYSIA?

The aim of this study is to clarify the role of social factors on individual taxpayers’ tax compliance behaviour in Malaysia. Studies with similar topics express the fact that there still exists a gap in the developing countries that impact the decision making on tax compliance. Malaysia is a multi-racial and cultural country with social factors to impact on tax compliance. Some of the factors impacting are cultural impact, political affiliation, and religiosity, which are considered to be playing an important role in individual tax compliance behaviour. The researcher used a survey method of research design. For that the population targeted was the individual taxpayers across Malaysia. A sample of 419 respondents had been taken for this study, using a convenient sampling method. Pearson correlation and multiple regression analysis had been employed to analyse the data. The outcome of the study reveals that changes in government policies, referral groups, the role of LHDN, and political affiliation are the main important variables that determine individual taxpayers’ tax compliance behaviour. This paper studied social factor variables, which finally fills the gap that existed in the literature and helps tax administration to develop effective compliance risk treatment

A Systematic Literature Review on Politically Connected Directors/CEOs and Financial Performance and Earnings Quality

The presence of political connected firms is widespread in global economy, triggering growing studies to investigate this issue in business operation. This study aims to provide a comprehensive systematic literature review of the existing literature on the impact of political connection in board of directors and top management team on firm performance. This study analyses the bibliometric data and conducts content analysis to identify the outcomes of the existing empirical studies in this research topic. Following PRISMA guidance, a sample of 52 studies between 2008 and 2023 from Scopus database were selected in this study. The results show that the interest on such research topic is in a growing trend. Chinese studies have dominated the samples due to the change of regulation. Additionally, majority of previous studies are conducted quantitatively with the use of secondary data, focusing on non-financial industry. Prior studies have shown mixed results on the impact of political connection on firm performance, indicating that it could be a double-edged sword to a firm. Finally, this study outlines future direction for further research, especially in methodological aspect

Board Diversity and Sustainability Reporting: Empirical Evidence from Indonesian Listed Banks

Sustainability reporting has gained a significant attention due to its importance for sustainable development goals. Following the increased concern of sustainability reporting in Indonesian business, this study examines the effect of board of commissioner’s diversity on sustainability reporting in Indonesian listed banks. The study explores the topics by following the concept of agency theory. Our study employs secondary data obtained from the annual and sustainability reports from 2014-2018. By using purposive sampling method, the study generates 210 observations in which the analysis is conducted with panel data regression using STATA statistics software. Our study finds that the sustainability reporting implementation of by Indonesian listed banks is still considerably low. There is also no significant improvement since the release of roadmap for sustainable finance in 2014 that enforce sustainability reporting for banking sector. Panel data regression analysis reveals that board’s gender diversity exhibits positive effect on sustainability reporting. Meanwhile, board’s diversity in nationality, age, and education have no significant effect on sustainability reporting practice. The insignificant effect may be due to the fact that the board is still dominated by of local board members, older board members, and board members with business education background. Based on our findings, we suggest the Indonesia Financial Service Authority (OJK) as the capital market regulator to improve firms' understanding about sustainability reporting and apply higher enforcement of its implementation. The OJK can optimize the role of board diversity as it has not contributed significantly to improving sustainability reporting practice. Further, future studies can be improved by employing mixed method by combining quantitative and qualitative analyses and also extending the coverage of the study

Does Religiosity Moderate Personal Tax Compliance? A Study Involving In-House Tax Professionals of Malaysian Businesses

This study limns the moderating impact of religiosity made on the in-house tax professionals who deal with tax affairs in the corporate sectors in Malaysia. Therefore, we intend to produce a seminal article, wherein religiosity is tested for its moderating effect between the determinants such as peers’ tax compliance, tax audit, service quality of tax authority, satisfaction with government spending, and the level of tax compliance among the tax affairs officers. Purposive and snowball sampling techniques have been chosen to collect data from the tax professionals of the Malaysian businesses. A total of 392 respondents have managed to participate in this survey questionnaire to disclose their opinion. “SmartPLS’ is used to analyse the data. The finding reveals that religiosity does not moderate the relationship between the determinants and the level of tax compliance among the Malaysian tax professionals. The interpretation of the relationship between the “Factors of Personal tax compliance’ (Independent variables) among the tax affairs officers of the Malaysian businesses and the “Personal tax compliance behaviour’ (Dependent variable) can be explained by 83.9 percent by the variance studied. To produce an extensive and expeditious report of exploration on the said nexus of personal tax compliance and the taxpayers’ decision on the corporate tax compliance, the selection of one type of data collection approach is not sufficient. Therefore, the future researchers are advised to make research with the collection of supplementary data, such as interviews, as their primary data collection so that the robustness of their findings could be strengthened

The Influence of Average Dividend Yield, Inflation Rate and Unemployment Rate on The Profitability Of Office-Based Malaysian Real Estate Investment Trusts (M-Reits)

One of the obstinate problems in the studies of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) is the difficulty in identifying the factors that determine the performance of REITs. Studies in the literature have so far developed various approaches to measure the performance of REITs, however, an exhaustive review of literature suggest the use of profitability to measure the performance of REITs. Though office-based REITs increasingly important in Malaysia, inferior number of studies made an attempt to investigate the performance. To fill the gap, this seminal article intends to investigate the relationship between the factors, such as average dividend yield, inflation rate, and unemployment rate, and the profitability of Malaysian office-based REITs using tax-adjusted value weighted index (TAVWI). To do so, this study unpacked 11 listed Malaysian office-based REITs to compute the TAVWI for the period starting from 1990 to 2019 with 30 observations. In doing so, descriptive analysis and multiple regression were employed to analyse the collected data. The insights reveal that profitability of Malaysian REITs is impacted negatively by dividend yield, while not by inflation rate and unemployment rate. As a whole, this article should be a useful resource for gaining fresh insights about the performance of office-based REITs in Malaysia

Corporate Tax Compliance and Mediating Role of Personal Tax Compliance Among Malaysian In-House Tax Professionals

Studies relating to tax compliance disclose that there is much likelihood of the corporate tax compliance behaviour getting influenced by the tax compliance behaviour of the in-house tax professionals. However, no studies have investigated the nexus between the personal tax compliance and the corporate tax compliance so far. Therefore, this study aims at investigating the link between the above two tax compliance behaviours and the mediating effect of the personal tax compliance behaviour of the in-house tax professionals on their corporate tax compliance behaviour. A sequential explanatory design is chosen to collect data from 392 in-house tax professionals through a survey questionnaire, and the findings obtained from the survey are supported further by the supplementary findings made by nine (9) tax experts from the tax authority, tax agency, and tax scholars of the institutions in Malaysia. Structural equation modelling is used to analyse the data taken from the findings that reveal that the factors that contribute to the tax compliance behaviour have strong influence on the personal tax compliance of the in-house tax professionals. Interestingly, their tax compliance behaviour strongly influences their corporate tax compliance as well. Further, the bootstrapping test reveals that personal tax compliance behaviour has a significant indirect effect on the corporate tax compliance. The empirical findings give a clue to the tax authorities to identify the root cause for the corporate tax non-compliance by investigating the decision makers’ tax compliance pattern. The researchers of the future studies are encouraged to follow the same method of data collection, along with the sequential explanatory design, and to consider the moderation effect of the financial constraints on the tax compliance behaviour