Accounting,paper shadows and the stigmatised poor

The social implications of accounting are explored through an historical study of spoiled identities in state welfare systems. The processing, recording, classification and communication inherent in the accounting practices deployed in such systems have the potential to (re)construct identities, inform perceptions of self and impact on the social relationships of the welfare claimant. The paper examines these potentialities through an investigation of the accounting regime attending the system of poor relief in Victorian England and Wales. Informed primarily by the work of Goffman it is suggested that accounting processes comprised degradation ceremonies which compounded the stigmatisation of the recipient of relief, accounting classifications served to inscribe existing and create additional spoiled identities of the pauper, and individualized forms of accounting disclosure compromised the management of stigma by the poor.     

New development: Budgetary accounting in Colombia—arguments for a much-needed reform

ABSTRACT

Public financial management reforms are needed in Colombia to integrate the accrual-based accounting system with budgets. This would remove the need to make accounting variations through deficit measurement and would supply better information about the impact of public policies on the country’s financial situation. This article briefly explains why Colombia needs to integrate its accounting and budgeting systems.     

关于建立国家统一会计核算制度的若干问题

建立国家统一会计核算制度非常必要。在建立过程中 ,有两个基本问题需要澄清 ,即会计标准的表现形式不是唯一的、会计标准也不存在绝对的优劣之分 ;有五个基本关系需要处理好 ,即会计核算制度与会计准则的关系、会计核算制度与税法的关系、会计核算制度与财务制度的关系、会计核算制度“新”和“旧”的关系、会计核算制度与国际会计惯例的关系。此外 ,为建立好国家统一会计核算制度 ,还需要设计好会计核算制度框架     

Implications of the ‘IAS Regulation’ for Research into the International Differences in Accounting Systems

Meek and Thomas (2004) call for research on the continued relevance of ‘rediscovered’ dichotomous accounting classifications. We provide such evidence by examining how developments surrounding the ‘IAS Regulation’ (1606/2002) influenced international differences in accounting systems in the European Union. Since a sufficient time series of actual post-2005 International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) reporting practice is not yet observable, we propose an initial re-classification of accounting systems based on evidence available to date, that is, the degree of implementation of the IAS Regulation in the Member States. Consistent with Nobes (1998), we find that the degree of public accountability to outside investors (the ‘public/private’ criterion) is becoming the primary differentiator for accounting systems in Europe, surpassing country-level variables such as legal system and culture. The distinction between consolidated and individual financial statements is the second emerging differentiator. While consolidated accounting is becoming more uniform across countries, cross-country cultural differences are most likely to persist in individual accounting. Based on our analysis we highlight two important areas of future research beyond the consolidated financial statements of listed firms (e.g. Nobes, 2005; Schipper, 2005). First, at the country level, the interaction of IFRS and individual financial statements will need to be reassessed. In addition, research could help introduce a degree of differentiation into financial reporting regulation for unlisted firms, because these firms are not a homogeneous group. Also, the convergence of national GAAP systems with IFRS will benefit from fresh research insights. Second, at the firm level, future research could analyze the extent to which the determinants and consequences of IFRS adoption, an area well researched for publicly traded firms (e.g. Cuijpers and Buijink, 2005), generalize to unlisted firms. Such research will help detect emerging patterns of accounting systems within an international context. It will generate insights into the disconnect of consolidated accounts from national influences, the degree of uniformity of consolidated accounts among international firms, the continued relevance of traditional classifications of international accounting systems for individual accounts and accounts of unlisted companies, and the convergence of national standards with IFRS.     

Cultural Relevance of Western Accounting Systems to Developing Countries

It has been suggested recently that the accounting systems used in developing countries may be irrelevant to their needs because they originate in Western countries with different cultural values. The accounting literature on this point, however, is vague in its assessment of exactly what aspects of Western accounting systems fail to meet the test of relevance. Furthermore, it is not clear whether the differences between the needs of users in various countries are differences in kind or only differences in degree. This article analyses these issues by introducing technical considerations in addition to the behavioural ones usually discussed and by separating out problems of accounting measurement from problems of accounting disclosure. This distinction is used to argue that it is the specific disclosure rules of particular calculations inherent in Western accounting systems rather than the transaction cost database that are most likely to fail to satisfy the needs of users in developing countries. The effect of the importation of the French Unified Accounting System to Lebanon is examined and an amended version of the Hofstede-Gray cultural accounting framework is used to clarify the concept of cultural relevance.     

Changes in accounting policies and investment analysts'' fixation on accounting figures

This paper describes and explains how investment analysts deal with changes in accounting policies. The extent to which analysts appear to be fixated on accounting figures is examined using their reports about companies that adopted accounting changes in their financial statements. Sixteen accounting policy changes were identified and divided into four categories and a distinction was made between strong and weak levels of fixation. Consideration is given to the level of fixation of investment analysts that can be explained by the extent of disclosure concerning the accounting change, the moment the accounting change is announced for the first time, the nature of the accounting change and the type of employer. The level of disclosure and the nature of accounting change are important determinants of fixation. Furthermore, it appears that financial journalists explain accounting changes and their effects on accounting figures more extensively than investment analysts employed by banks or firms of stockbrokers. This study focuses on investment reports in practice in a Dutch context, in contrast to previous research conducted in experimental settings.     

Accounting for banks,capital regulation and risk-taking

This paper examines risk-taking incentives in banks under different accounting regimes in presence of capital regulation. In the model the bank jointly determines the capital issuance and investment policy. Given an exogenous minimum capital requirement, lower-of-cost-or-market accounting is the most effective regime that induces the bank to issue more excess equity capital above the minimum required level and implement less risky investment policy. However, the disciplining role of lower-of-cost-or-market accounting may discourage the bank from exerting project discovery effort ex-ante. From the regulator’s perspective, the accounting regime that maximizes the social welfare is determined by a tradeoff between the social cost of capital regulation and the efficiency of the bank’s project discovery efforts. When the former effect dominates, the regulator prefers lower-of-cost-or-market accounting; when the latter effect dominates, the regulator may prefer other regimes.     

Why Do Politicians Intervene in Accounting Regulation? The Role of Ideology and Special Interests

Politicians frequently intervene in the regulation of financial accounting. Evidence from the accounting literature shows that regulatory capture by special interests helps explain these interventions. However, many accounting rules have broad economic or social consequences, such as their effects on income distribution or private sector subsidies. The perception of these consequences varies with a politician's ideology. Therefore, if accounting rules produce those consequences, ideology plausibly spills over and explains a politician's stance on the technical accounting issue, beyond special interest pressure. We use two prominent U.S. political debates about fair value accounting and the expensing of employee stock options to disentangle the role of ideology from special interest pressure. In both debates, ideology explains politicians’ involvement at exactly those points when the debate focuses on the economic consequences of accounting regulation (i.e., bank bailouts and top management compensation). Once the debates focus on more technical issues, connections to special interests remain the dominant force.     

Corporate Scandals and Regulation

Are regulatory interventions delayed reactions to market failures or can regulators proactively pre‐empt corporate misbehavior? From a public interest view, we would expect “effective” regulation to ex ante mitigate agency conflicts between corporate insiders and outsiders, and prevent corporate misbehavior from occurring or quickly rectify transgressions. However, regulators are also self‐interested and may be captured, uninformed, or ideological, and become less effective as a result. In this registered report, we develop a historical time series of corporate (accounting) scandals and (accounting) regulations for a panel of 26 countries from 1800 to 2015. An analysis of the lead‐lag relations at both the global and individual country level yields the following insights: (1) Corporate scandals are an antecedent to regulation over long stretches of time, suggesting that regulators are typically less flexible and informed than firms. (2) Regulation is positively related to the incidence of future scandals, suggesting that regulators are not fully effective, that explicit rules are required to identify scandalous corporate actions, or that new regulations have unintended consequences. (3) There exist systematic differences in these lead‐lag relations across countries and over time, suggesting that the effectiveness of regulation is shaped by fundamental country characteristics like market development and legal tradition.     

Disclosure and the Cost of Capital: A Survey of the Theoretical Literature

This article offers a survey of theoretical research on disclosure and the cost of capital. We summarize the current state of the literature and discuss the channels through which information affects the cost of capital. After giving an overview of asset pricing theory, we examine the rationale for an accounting risk factor or an ex‐ante effect of information on the cost of capital. Then, we discuss the role of voluntary disclosure, heterogenous beliefs, investor base, liquidity shocks, earnings management, and agency problems as determinants of the cost of capital. Linkages between productive decisions and the cost of capital, and their implication for investor welfare, are also examined.     

Analyst Following and Forecast Accuracy After Mandated IFRS Adoptions

This study investigates how accounting harmonization affects one particular group of financial statement users—financial analysts. We find that mandatory International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption attracts foreign analysts, particularly those from countries that are simultaneously adopting IFRS along with the covered firm's country and those with prior IFRS experience. We also find that mandatory IFRS adoption improves foreign analysts’ forecast accuracy. The change in analyst following increases with the distance between prior local Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and IFRS and with the extent to which IFRS adoption eliminates GAAP differences between the firm's country and the analyst's country. IFRS adoption also attracts more local analysts, particularly those with prior IFRS experience and with an international portfolio prior to mandated IFRS adoption in their home country. Local analysts’ forecast accuracy is not affected by IFRS adoption. Overall, our results suggest that accounting harmonization brings comparability benefits that enhance the usefulness of accounting data.     

A Statistical Model of International Accounting Harmonization

This article shows how the difference between the observed frequencies of accounting policy choice and the outcome of a random policy choice, where each available method has an equal chance of being selected, may be fully explained with a statistical model. The process of harmonization is described in a way that identifies departures from equiprobable accounting policy choice as either: (a) the systematic effects of harmonization, or (b) the effects of systematic divergence from international harmony where the frequency of adoption of differing accounting methods varies across countries, or (c) the effects of company-specific accounting policy choices. The understanding of harmony that underlies previous attempts to measure harmonization is such that, with respect to a particular financial statement item, a situation of maximum harmony is reached when all companies in all countries use the same accounting method. From the standpoint of modelling the harmonization process. however, a different concept of harmony may be more useful. In this article, therefore, we posit a state of distributional harnzony in which, other things being equal, the expected distribution of accounting policy choices is the same in each country. In this theoretical state. the odds of selecting a given accounting method from those available for a particular financial statement item are identical for each country. A major advantage of this benchmark is that it provides a basis for distinguishing between two possibly conflicting components of the international harmonization process: between-country harmonization and within-country standardization. A hierarchy of nested statistical models is then used to describe accounting policy choices made by companies with an international shareholding and registered in Europe, where the European Union has been involved in a program of accounting harmonization. The accounting policies analysed in depth in this article comprise the treatment of goodwill and accounting for deferred taxation. The results are compared with the comparability index method used previously in harmonization research studies.     

会计诚信问题的理性思考

文章结合这几年中外会计信息严重失真的现实,说明会计诚信缺失已成为一个国际性难题。西方发达国 家经济成功的历史经验证明,会计诚信原则客观存在并对促进经济发展发挥着基础性作用。作者把当代会计诚 信缺失归因为会计陷入了“囚徒困境”,而市场经济发展的不充分,垄断现象的存在,则导致了会计诚信原则的 实现具有很大的相对性。最后运用社会契约理论,揭示了中国会计实务的“超规范” 内涵,指出现实中会计 “道德自由空间”存在着伦理规范与真实规范之间的尖锐对立,从而导致会计作假问题。解决问题的可行方法是 让单位领导人成为会计法律责任的惟一责任人,这样才有望真正确立中国会计的诚信原则。     

Case-based Reasoning and Multiple-agent Systems for Accounting Regulation Systems with Extensions

One of the areas of judgment research in accounting and financial applications is that of accounting regulation. Previously, artificial intelligence efforts at modeling human judgment in accounting regulation systems have concentrated on rule-based expert systems. In those systems, general heuristic knowledge was captured using ‘if … then …’ rules in order to model particular decision processes. Recent developments in artificial intelligence have focused on case-based reasoning (CBR) and multiple-agent intelligent systems (MAIS). The ideas behind CBR are that ‘if it worked once then remember to use it again’ and ‘if it did not work before, then remember to not use it again‘. MAIS assumes that many organizational systems can be treated as computational models of multiple-interacting intelligent agents. Typically, solutions may be derived using some form of negotiations between agents to accomplish single global or separate individual interacting goals. This paper argues that many accounting regulation judgment processes can be modeled using CBR and MAIS. As a result, it summarizes some examples of both CBR and MAIS useful in accounting regulation and extends those to other accounting applications. In addition, it describes the results of some previously developed systems that employ CBR or MAIS.     

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AND ACCOUNTING MODELS OF THE REPORTING ENTITY

The IASC’s Framework (1989) allows a choice of accounting models when measuring financial performance. However, subsequent reports by the G4+1 focus exclusively on the version of the Assets−Liabilities=Equity model pioneered by the[16], [17]. Sub-components of income, such as operating income, are acknowledged as important but these are treated as matters for display and are not conceptually defined. The issue of model choice has assumed increased importance following the decision of the EU to require the group accounts of listed companies to comply with International Accounting Standards by 2005. In this paper the emerging literature that links styles of corporate governance to financial and legal systems and then to economic performance is extended to consider the role of accounting model choice. The issue of accounting for non-reciprocal transfers, in particular, government grants, is used to illustrate the reduction in the relevance, reliability and comparability of financial statements that result from the failure to provide a conceptual definition of performance at the level of operating profit. Compliance with UK disclosure requirements for government grants following the 1981 Companies Act is investigated and differences in the corporate governance, financial, legal and accounting systems of Germany, a code law country, and the UK, a common law country, are reviewed. To serve the interests of investors in all jurisdictions and the information requirements of different styles of corporate governance it is recommended that different accounting models be applied to measure operating income and shareholder income in a single income statement.     

Accounting benefits and satisfaction in an ERP environment

Over the past decade, organizations all over the world have adopted enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. There has been little research at a global scale regarding the accounting benefits of adopting enterprise systems. Moreover, there are virtually no studies that examine in detail the relation between accounting benefits and ERP user satisfaction. Sutton (2006) addressed the need for empirical research on the impact of ERP in terms of accounting advantages and disadvantages. The principal aim of our study was to investigate the accounting benefits that the adoption of an ERP system by companies may entail in relation to ERP user satisfaction. This study explored the impact that the ERP system has had on accounting information and practice. This study also examined whether or not there are differences between accountants and IT professionals concerning how each group assesses ERP accounting benefits and ERP user satisfaction. The participants of this study comprised 175 accountants and 96 IT professionals from 193 companies in Greece. The empirical evidence confirms a number of accounting benefits derived from ERP systems particularly for accounting process. No statistically significant differences were found between the perceptions of accountants and IT professionals concerning ERP accounting benefits. Furthermore, this research identifies factors related to accounting benefits and ERP cost which affect the level of ERP user satisfaction. The implications of these results for practice and research are explored. The findings of this study will be of value to any companies considering the inclusion of their accounting techniques and operations in an ERP system. Furthermore, the results of this study will provide stimulus for consequent research in the field in order to further examine and account for the accounting benefits that can occur from ERP system implementation as well as the effect of those benefits on ERP user satisfaction.     

Accounting control systems and business strategy: An empirical analysis

Accounting theoreticians have argued that control systems should be modified in accordance with the business strategy of a firm. This study tests this hypothesis by examining differences in accounting control system attributes between two groups of firms following distinctly different strategies. Interview data and questionnaire data are used to provide evidence of the ways in which firms align their control systems and strategy. In addition, prelimenary evidence is discussed which suggests a relationship between accounting control systems, business strategy and firm performance.     

Towards a Theory of Cultural Influence on the Development of Accounting Systems Internationally

Research has shown that accounting follows different patterns in different parts of the world. There have been claims that national systems are determined by environmental factors. In this context, cultural factors have not been fully considered. This paper proposes four hypotheses on the relationship between identified cultural characteristics and the development of accounting systems, the regulation of the accounting profession and attitudes towards financial management and disclosure. The hypotheses are not operationalized, and empirical tests have not been carried out. They are proposed here as a first step in the development of a theory of cultural influence on the development of accounting systems.     

Analysis of Accounting Expert Systems Citations: An Alternative Accounting Classification Scheme

This paper compares and contrasts a paper by Shanker, Nilakanta, and Norris (1992) that quantitatively analyzes citations with Brown (1989). The analytical approach used by Shanker et al. is discussed in light of the background and limitations of the original study, the accounting classification scheme used for the analysis, and classification differences caused by either authors classifying their own articles or someone else classifying the articles based on abstracts. An alternative accounting classification scheme is presented that uses four dimensions to describe and organize the discipline of accounting: accounting tasks, domain, organization type, and service provider. In this context, a number of representative accounting expert systems are classified and discussed. Recommendations are suggested for further research.