Accounting Perspectives最新文献

This paper reviews how the accounting literature has investigated accrual-based earnings management (AEM) in relation to regulation. After describing the development of accrual-based models to measure earnings management, I provide evidence that the accounting literature has investigated AEM and regulation to answer six types of research questions. First, researchers investigate whether firms manage earnings before a regulatory event to benefit from it or to avoid its negative consequences. Second, they look at whether firms engage in AEM after the implementation of a new regulation to avoid the regulatory costs associated with lack of compliance or to respect regulatory industry ratios. Third, researchers use accruals quality metrics to investigate the change in quality of accounting after a change in regulation. Fourth, they use accruals quality metrics to analyze the impact of differences between regulatory environments. Fifth, researchers exploit Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases to clearly identify samples of low-quality firms in order to develop new earnings management models, test the specifications of existing models, or identify new patterns linked to earnings management. Sixth, the accounting literature employs regulation to investigate potential complementarity or substitution effects between accrual-based and real earnings management. I also discuss how the emergence of new technologies such as machine learning, the ongoing debate between single-accrual and aggregate models, regulatory events other than laws, and recent regulations create opportunities for future research into AEM in relation to regulation.

With the rise of the #MeToo movement, workplace harassment has become an important board issue. Despite this, little has been written on the role that boards, and governance in general, should play in reducing the potential for employee harassment in the workplace. This compact, in-class teaching case, which is based on an actual employee lawsuit in Canada, fills this gap by reviewing the role of the board in addressing employee workplace harassment. The case takeaways focus on the steps boards should take once they receive an employee harassment complaint, the policies and procedures boards must ensure are in place to protect their employees from workplace harassment, and the options available for students if they encounter workplace harassment in their future careers. The case concludes by reviewing best practices for recruiting board members as well as deciding on the future of the organization's president.

Organizational leaders identify corporate sustainability as a complicated and urgent business imperative that their organizations face. The management accountant's role is to help develop accounting systems to measure and report corporate sustainability, yet several factors contribute to the contemporary management accountant's challenges in satisfying stakeholder demands to integrate sustainability into their practices and operations. Like sustainability, the tenets of paradox theory revolve around salient interdependent tensions with contradictions that persist across time. Therefore, I propose paradox theory as an alternative to the business case framing that currently dominates sustainability decision-making. In this paper, I synthesize the existing literature at the intersection of management accounting, corporate sustainability, and paradox theory. My research also unearths a new paradox, one currently absent from the literature: the corporate sustainability temporal paradox. Finally, I offer a set of theory-based research questions geared toward moving beyond business case thinking in accounting corporate sustainability research.

On November 19, 1998, Toronto entertainment company Livent Inc. filed for protection under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act, further to issuing a press release stating that the company's audited financial statements contained irregularities. This high-profile bankruptcy serves as a reminder that Canadian companies are not immune from financial manipulations. The proposed case study lets students act as the auditors responsible for the audit engagement for Livent's financial year ended December 31, 1996, which was the financial year that preceded its failure. Students will be responsible for discussing the work performed by Deloitte & Touche and implementing audit procedures for complex transactions that the company has handled. The students must be capable of identifying the factors that may have impacted the audit and the engagement risk and will be asked to establish materiality. This case study is based on facts as related by the press and the various legal authorities who dealt with the affair.