Accounting Perspectives最新文献

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.

On December 20, 2017, the Supreme Court of Canada ended the suspense surrounding 20 years of court cases when it found the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche (Deloitte) guilty of negligence in its audit of the 1997 financial statements of Livent Inc. As part of a concurrent process, the Discipline Committee of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario (now CPA Ontario) also had to rule on the conduct of the professionals involved in auditing Livent. This case study asks students to play the role of members of the Discipline Committee assigned to judge the work performed by Deloitte's auditors. The students should be able to identify instances of noncompliance with professional standards, mainly Canadian Auditing Standards 200 and 240, and determine whether the auditors should be found guilty of professional misconduct. The students will be asked whether they would have arrived at the same verdict as did the Discipline Committee members.

This study uses semistructured interviews to gain insights from 19 practicing Canadian audit partners into the practical implications of the engagement partner identity mandate requiring firms to disclose the identity of the engagement partner(s) auditing Canadian publicly traded companies. Building on prior literature that suggests accountability can reach a ceiling, we explore whether audit partners perceive incremental increases in accountability pressures to be effective in increasing audit quality. Based on the existing literature, we propose a nonlinear relation between accountability and performance (audit quality, in the current context), reflecting this ceiling effect. We find partners believe they are reaching, or are at, a ceiling level of accountability and that further initiatives to increase their accountability are ineffective in eliciting procedural changes in the audit or the audit's outcome. Contrary to regulators' motives for the disclosure, our interviewed partners do not believe the transparency of publicly disclosing their names will further increase their level of accountability or overall audit quality. We document that one possible reason for the disconnect is that partners are less concerned with managing external reputation than with managing internal reputation, which they believe has a more direct impact on their careers. We also discuss partners' perceptions of the required disclosure's impact on individual reputations, client risk choices, personal safety, and partner recruitment. We offer suggestions for future research building on the partners' insights.

This paper investigates the impact of corporate sustainability and the consistency of corporate sustainability efforts on firm financial performance in Canada. Using data on 266 Canadian companies over the 2007–2017 period, we find a significantly positive association between corporate sustainability performance and firm financial performance. In addition, we find that companies that perform consistently well on sustainability (i.e., consistent performers) achieve better financial performance compared to inconsistent performers. Thus, far from their being net costs/expenses, our results indicate that corporate sustainability performance and consistency in sustainability performance both provide net benefits and significantly impact financial performance positively, implying that corporate sustainability not only helps address the needs of the current and future generations but also has a positive effect on the corporate bottom line. Taken together, our results suggest that not only does corporate sustainability have a positive effect on firm performance, but better financial performance may be achieved through a committed—rather than a “tokenism”—approach to corporate sustainability.

As business, government, and society continue to emphasize the importance of sustainability—both of individual organizations and of the natural world—accounting standard-setting bodies want to be part of the process. In September 2020, in response to “urgent and growing demand” for more “consistent and comparable” sustainability reporting, the IFRS Foundation (the Foundation) released for comment a Consultation Paper on Sustainability Reporting. In the paper, the Foundation proposed the creation of a Sustainability Standards Board (SSB), which it would oversee alongside the IASB. The SSB would become, de facto, the global sustainability reporting standard setter. The Foundation received 577 responses to its proposal. These responses came from around the world and from a wide range of stakeholders. Thirty-eight of the responses came from Canada. This study profiles the Canadian responses, contrasting them with the wider set of worldwide responses. Some uniquely Canadian features include user responses from a large number of pension funds and preparer responses solely from the energy sector. There was also a significant response from the Canadian accounting community, including from the full set of Canadian standard-setting organizations. Five auditors general also responded. Overall, Canadian respondents supported both globalized sustainability reporting standards and the Foundation's creation of the SSB. This support aligns Canada's response with the worldwide response.

This article investigates experimentally, in the income tax context, how whistleblowing intentions are influenced when a tax fraud perpetrator is of a different race than a potential whistleblower. In particular, it examines the impact of a message highlighting the social value of whistleblowing and how fear of being perceived as racist influences whistleblowing decision-making. Using insights from the fear elicitation and processing literature, we find that a potential whistleblower from a majority racial group who learns about a fraud perpetrated by someone from a minority racial group is significantly more likely to blow the whistle anonymously when a social value message is present versus absent, as the presence of a social value message reduces fear of being perceived as racist. However, we do not find that race dissimilarity is significantly associated with non-anonymous whistleblowing intentions, irrespective of the presence of a social value message. Furthermore, in non-anonymous whistleblowing situations, potential whistleblowers have to disclose their identities to the tax authority to become eligible for a cash reward. Even when potential whistleblowers can choose the amount of a cash reward they would have to be paid in order to blow the whistle, our results show that whistleblowing intentions do not increase significantly when perpetrators and potential whistleblowers are of different races. Overall, our results suggest that the societal value of tax whistleblowing and the use of cash rewards for whistleblowing are limited by other sociological considerations.