The application of text mining in accounting

By facilitating the derivation of knowledge and qualitative measures from textual data, text mining techniques have come into vogue in various domains and industries. Namely in accounting, text mining outputs can elucidate, complement, and validate the customary quantitative data. This study creates an up-to-date view of text mining applications in accounting practice. Through a critical review of text mining literature, insight is given into the stages of a typical text mining process, contemporary text mining techniques that have been named valuable in an accounting context, and the information that can be obtained by applying these techniques.     

Variation in sustainability assurance practice: An analysis of accounting versus non-accounting providers

This study explores sustainability assurance (SA) practice as an arena of jurisdictional competition between accounting and non-accounting assurance providers. Prior literature on SA, a non-financial assurance practice, has documented the presence of both accounting and non-accounting firms as two major provider categories, pointing to the possibility of significant variation in practice among them. Unlike most prior studies that rely on the analysis of the content of SA reports, this article draws on an in-depth interview-based investigation of the practice. In particular, by reference to Abbott's theory of professions (1988), we explore efforts by different SA providers to claim their professional practice space. Our findings reveal notable differences in the providers' approaches to SA, both between and within the two key provider groups. We make sense of these differences as a consequence of the inter- and intra-professional competitive dynamics where different categories of providers appeal to and emphasize divergent knowledge bases and distinctive types of expertise as a way to differentiate themselves from competition and legitimize their practice approaches. This study contributes to the extant SA literature by providing a holistic overview of the practice field and an empirically drawn perspective on the nature of practice variation.     

Cultural relativity of accounting professionalism: Evidence from New Zealand and Samoa

This study investigates the value orientations of two culturally distinct countries in the South Pacific, namely, Samoa and New Zealand, with a view to providing empirical evidence on the relationships between accounting and culture. It uses Rokeach's value survey (1973), Schwartz and Bilsky's motivational domains (1987, 1990), and Hofstede–Gray framework to establish the possible linkages between values and accounting professionalism. The results provide culture-related evidence that suggests the possibility for the existence of major differences in the levels of accounting professionalism in the two countries. This study may have implications for the application of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and the analysis of differences in judgments of professional accountants on measurement, disclosure, and ethical issues. It is the first substantial accounting study on Samoa.     

Detecting accounting fraud in companies reporting under US GAAP through data mining

The accounting fraud detection models developed on financial data prepared under US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) in the current literature achieve significantly weaker performance than models based on financial data prepared under different accounting standards. This study contributes to the US GAAP accounting fraud data mining literature through the attainment of higher model performance than that reported in the prior literature. Financial data from the 10-K forms of 320 fraudulent financial statements (80 fraudulent companies) and 1,200 nonfraudulent financial statements (240 nonfraudulent companies) were collected from the US Security and Exchange Commission. The eight most commonly used data mining techniques were applied to develop prediction models. The results were cross-validated on a testing dataset and then compared according to parameters of accuracy, F-measure, and type I and II errors with existing studies from the US, China, Greece, and Taiwan. As a result, the developed predictive models for accounting fraud achieved performance comparable to those achieved by models built on data from other accounting standards. Moreover, the developed models also significantly outperformed (accuracy 10.5%, F-measure 16.1%, type I error 12.2% and type II error 15.2%) existing studies based on US GAAP financial data. Furthermore, this study provides an extensive literature review encompassing recent accounting fraud theory. It enhances the existing US fraud data mining literature with a performance comparison of studies based on other accounting standards.     

The design and use of performance management systems: An extended framework for analysis

Issues in the area of performance management and management control systems are typically complex and intertwined, but research tends to be based on simplified and partial settings. Simplification has made the work easier to carry out, but it has come at the price of increased ambiguity and conflicting findings from different studies. To help mitigate these issues, this paper puts forward the performance management systems framework as a research tool for describing the structure and operation of performance management systems (PMSs) in a more holistic manner. The framework was developed from the relevant literature and from our observations and experience. In particular, it elaborates the 5 questions of Otley's [Otley, D., 1999. Performance management: a framework for management control systems research. Management Accounting Research 10, 363–382] performance management framework into 12 questions and integrates aspects of Simons’ levers of control framework.Anecdotal evidence suggests that the extended framework provides a useful research tool for those wishing to study the design and operation of performance management systems by providing a template to help describe the key aspects of such systems. It allows an holistic overview to be taken while making this a feasible task. The paper uses material from two field studies to illustrate how the framework can be used to provide an overview of the major performance management issues within an organization.     

Journal entry anomaly detection model

Although numerous scientific papers have been written on deep learning, very few have been written on the exploitation of such technology in the field of accounting or bookkeeping. Our scientific study is oriented exactly toward this specific field. As accountants, we know the problems faced in modern accounting. Although accountants may have a plethora of information regarding technology support, looking for errors or fraud is a demanding and time-consuming task that depends on manual skills and professional knowledge. Our efforts are oriented toward resolving the problem of error-detection automation that is currently possible through new technologies, and we are trying to develop a web application that will alleviate the problems of journal entry anomaly detection. Our developed application accepts data from one specific enterprise resource planning system while also representing a general software framework for other enterprise resource planning developers. Our web application is a prototype that uses two of the most popular deep-learning architectures; namely, a variational autoencoder and long short-term memory. The application was tested on two different journals: data set D, learned on accounting journals from 2007 to 2018 and then tested during the year 2019, and data set H, learned on journals from 2014 to 2016 and then tested during the year 2017. Both accounting journals were generated by micro entrepreneurs.     

A commentary on “Why DCF capital budgeting is bad for business and why business schools should stop teaching it”

‘Towards a conceptual framework for auditing’ suggest a conceptual framework, which it is hoped may help in the teaching and understanding of external attest auditing. Briloff's (1986) view that ‘as concern for ecology and the wellbeing of consumers in posterity intensifies, this responsibility (accountability) will extend to the total society and environment’ is taken as the philosophical departure point for the conceptual framework.

The paucity of attempts to develop a unifying theory of auditing is noted and a brief history of developments is traced commencing with Mautz and Sharaf in 1961. Flint's 1988 work (The Philosophy and Principles of Auditing) is adopted and developed. Each of Flint's concepts is examined in some detail to consider its significance in the conceptual framework and its implications for audit practice. Reasons for changes from earlier frameworks are offered.

In order to illustrate the effectiveness of the framework as an holistic tool of analysis, the concepts identified are then related to the Auditing Standards and Guidelines of our national professional accounting association, the New Zealand Society of Accountants (NZSA). Whilst considerable correlation is noted, some inconsistencies are also identified. It is suggested that the standards and guidelines may not have derived from any philosophical analysis and that the inconsistencies between the concepts and the standards appear to have resulted from a lack of a clear theory as to what constitutes a standard and what constitutes a guideline; higher and lower order ideas would appear to fall somewhat indiscriminately in both. It is noted that this analysis may be repeated in respect of the auditing standards of any professional organization.

It is concluded that the application of these concepts can lead to more informed discussion of some of the controversial issues that face the auditing profession at this time, and to an holistic understanding of the discipline of auditing as well as of professional audit promulgations. It is recommended that standard setters should give thought to the adoption of a more holistic approach to standard setting, grounded in a conceptual framework, and that auditing educators should adopt such a framework in order to assist students towards an understanding of the role and process of auditing and away from the memorizing of techniques.     

Companies,Corporations and Accounting Change, 1835–1933: A Comparative Study

The accounting literature usually associates the development of external reporting in nineteenth century Britain with the emergence of the limited company. Innovation and progress is attributed to pressure from market forces in an unregulated environment. This is an oversimplification, and ignores the process of acccounting change within two important categories of trading organisation. Companies in certain industries—including water, gas, electricity, tramways and railways—were subject to close statutory regulation, while municipal corporations operated within a statutory framework of accountability which left scope for market forces and professional leadership to influence the development of contemporary practices. This paper compares and contrasts the accounting and audit regulations and practices of the three categories of ‘business’ entity. The developmental path is charted and differences are identified. The differential reporting objectives and environmental conditions applying to these entities are acknowledged throughout, and the mechanism by which ideas were transferred between various sectors is considered.     

Contemporary performance measurement systems: A review of their consequences and a framework for research

The main purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework for understanding the literature on the consequences of contemporary performance measurement (CPM) systems and the theories that explain these consequences. The framework is based on an in-depth review of 76 empirical studies published in high-quality academic journals in the areas of accounting, operations, and strategy. The framework classifies the consequences of CPM into three categories: people's behaviour, organizational capabilities, and performance consequences. This paper discusses our current knowledge on the impact of CPM, highlighting inconsistencies and gaps as well as providing direction for future research.     

An ethnographic study of culture and performance in the UK lingerie industry

This paper examines a particular case of organizational culture, its nature within the work environment, the impact it has on motivation and its interaction with a novel framework of performance measurement. It extends the extant empirical domain of such studies to include a retail unit in the UK lingerie industry. The work is an ethnographic study, and uses participant-observation to focus on the performance framework used and the culture in the unit examined. The evidence shows that a strong culture, in tandem with the innovative package of performance measures in this organization, together lead to enhanced performance. The paper makes an empirical contribution to the literature by using ethnographical evidence on accounting practice, as moderated by organizational culture in this unique setting. From a practical standpoint, it proposes that managers pay more attention to the influence of accounting on organizational culture (and vice versa), when setting performance targets and goals.     

Big data and algorithmic trading against periodic and tangible asset reporting: The need for U-XBRL

The gradual but marked decline in the correspondence between aggregated accounting numbers and market valuations, such as stock returns, is a well-documented phenomenon in the research literature (Lev and Zarowin, 1999). Rapid advances in technology have paved the way for the collection of unprecedented volumes of data. Currently, the slow speed of information dissemination, laggard accounting systems, and a focus on high levels of aggregation are perhaps the largest contributors to waning relevance of financial reporting. The fight for trading superiority is leading users to seek relevant data elsewhere and may contribute to these observed effects. This paper proposes an accounting system known as User XBRL (U-XBRL) designed to overcome these issues. This system collects, analyzes, and displays information in such a way that caters to the speed, detail, and customization demands of modern-day stakeholders (Krahel and Titera, 2015). U-XBRL amalgamates all types of data pertinent to a business, including both internal company data and exogenous source data. Each piece of data is assigned to a firm resource according to the resource-based view. Then, U-XBRL standardizes the information according to data standards and feeds it to a central repository. This repository is primarily organized through XBRL tags and is governed secondarily by other standards and taxonomies. A number of applications can be used individually to select data from the repository for analysis. Using U-XBRL the recognition, monitoring, and assurance of resources are streamlined.     

How far can we trust earnings numbers? What research tells us about earnings management

The article reviews the recent academic research literature on earnings management (EM) with a view to identifying research themes and results of interest to users and preparers of financial statements, accounting standard setters, and others with responsibility for ensuring that companies provide financial information to shareholders that can be relied upon. Hopefully students of accounting with an interest in exploring the EM literature will find that the article provides a useful framework. The literature on this topic is vast, and it is not possible to cover every article in detail. I provide an impressionistic survey that highlights examples of specific research themes and methods that regularly appear in the literature. Most of the examples are chosen from the literature published since 2000, although I do also highlight a few methodological contributions that appeared earlier. It is inevitable that the selection of articles reflects to some extent my personal interests and biases (intentional or otherwise). Thus, I wish to acknowledge that I owe a very substantial intellectual debt to the insights and contributions of the many uncited authors of a literature that spans over 40 years in over 20 accounting and finance journals.     

Some issues in blockchain for accounting and the supply chain,with an application of distributed databases to virtual organizations

This paper reviews some recent blockchain‐based applications for information capture, distribution and preservation. As part of that review, this paper examines two key concerns with current blockchain designs for accounting and supply chain transactions: data independence and multiple semantic models for the same information distribution problem. Blockchain applications typically integrate database, application and presentation tiers all in the same ledger. This results in a general inability to query information in the ledger and other concerns. Further, since most applications appear to be private blockchain applications, there is a concern of agents needing to accommodate multiple blockchains depending on who their trading partners are and what they request. Finally, this paper uses a distributed database to design a ‘blockchain‐like’ system for virtual organizations.     

Financial process mining - Accounting data structure dependent control flow inference

The increasing integration of computer technology for the processing of business transactions and the growing amount of financially relevant data in organizations create new challenges for external auditors. The availability of digital data opens up new opportunities for innovative audit procedures. Process mining can be used as a novel data analysis technique to support auditors in this context. Process mining algorithms produce process models by analyzing recorded event logs. Contemporary general purpose mining algorithms commonly use the temporal order of recorded events for determining the control flow in mined process models. The presented research shows how data dependencies related to the accounting structure of recorded events can be used as an alternative to the temporal order of events for discovering the control flow. The generated models provide accurate information on the control flow from an accounting perspective and show a lower complexity compared to those generated using timestamp dependencies. The presented research follows a design science research approach and uses three different real world data sets for evaluation purposes.     

Sustainability accounting—a brief history and conceptual framework

Research linking accounting to the emerging concept of sustainability surfaced in the early 1990s and has received continuing attention in academic and professional accounting literature. This paper tracks this brief history through to the release of the Sustainability Reporting Guidelines at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in August 2002, consolidating the various approaches into a sustainability accounting framework. The result is a comprehensive reporting model that presents an enormous challenge to business organisations, requiring a significant commitment of resources to achieve widespread implementation. Failure to meet this challenge enables business organisations to continue to avoid accountability for their continuing unsustainability. The paper concludes with a personal view as to how implementation of the sustainability accounting framework could proceed.     

25 Years of Giddens in accounting research: Achievements, limitations and the future

Twenty five years ago, Giddens’ structuration theory (ST) was introduced into accounting research as a reaction to the history-less, apolitical and technical-efficiency focus of traditional functionalist research. A quarter of a century later, this growing stream of research consists of some 65 published papers and has become one of the dominant alternative approaches used to explore accounting as an organizational and social practice. We review this literature based on the following two research questions; (i) what are the major achievements of this literature, and in what respects has it contributed to our understanding of accounting in relation to other alternative streams of accounting research, such as those grounded in critical theory, actor-network theory (ANT), new-institutional sociology (NIS) and practice theory? and; (ii) what are the limitations of the ST strand and, considering these (and its relative strengths), how should it be advanced in the future? Overall, we find that the mobilization of ST as a general ontological framework has generated three major and largely unique contributions, namely; (i) the introduction of a duality perspective; (ii) the conceptualization of accounting as an interwoven totality comprised of structures of signification, domination and legitimation, and; (iii) an ontological basis for theorizing how, when and why socially embedded agents may produce both continuity and change in accounting practices. However, we also conclude that it is difficult to identify a particular and distinctive empirical imprint of the ST literature, and that some of the theory’s ‘competitive advantages’ are far from fully exploited. Based on these identified strengths and weaknesses of the ST perspective, we consider an array of directions for future scholarly effort.     

The process of measurement in managerial accounting: A psycho-technical systems perspective

This paper develops a formal framework of the act or process of measurement in managerial accounting. Although the traditional paradigm of measurement underlying accounting treats it as a technology designed to represent properties of events and transactions in numerical terms, this paper is based on the notion that managerial accounting measurement is intended to facilitate behavior, and thus requires an alternative view of measurement as a “psycho-technical system”. The paper presents the psycho-technical framework and examines its application in selected areas of managerial accounting: human resource accounting, social accounting, divisional performance evaluation, zero-based budgeting, standard costing, and evaluation of internal control systems.     

An empirical study of the value-relevance of using proportionate consolidation accounting for investments in joint ventures

This research examines bond risk premiums to determine whether creditors of companies with investments in joint ventures reflect legal or implicit measures of the debts of joint ventures. The legal view suggests that the amount of potential loss from an investment in a joint venture is limited to the investment. The implicit view suggests that the operations of the joint venture and the venturer are interdependent. Equity method accounting reflects the legal view and proportionate consolidation reflects the implicit view.The study examines whether bond risk premiums are more highly associated with accounting numbers from proportionate consolidation than equity method accounting. The study uses data from 10Ks, the Wall Street Journal, and Moody's Bond Record from May 1, 1995 through April 30, 1998. These 4 years are used because US interest rates were fairly stable during this period, which is an important factor when examining bond risk premiums. Additionally, the companies in the study needed to remain stable across the window of study – no mergers, acquisitions, buy-outs, or liquidations – in order to maintain a comparative sample over the entire time period. The risk premium model uses measures of default that change between equity method accounting and proportionate consolidation. Differences in the explanatory power of the model determine how creditors view the joint venture debts.The study shows that approximately half of equity investments represent investments in joint ventures. Furthermore, the average joint venture uses debt to finance about two-thirds of the assets. The results show that proportionate consolidation fails to improve the explanatory power of the model when examining the entire set of companies that invest in joint ventures. However, the data reject the null hypothesis of no improvement with proportionate consolidation when examining companies who guarantee the debt of their joint venture. The policy implication of this study indicates that a change to proportionate consolidation would provide more value-relevant information to creditors when companies guarantee the debt of the joint venture.     

The causes of misapplied capacity related manufacturing costs and corresponding reporting implications: A conceptual perspective

To meet external financial reporting requirements, fixed (i.e., capacity related) manufacturing overhead costs are typically applied to inventory via the use of a predetermined overhead application rate. However, textbooks do not consider all appropriate conceptual issues regarding the setting of the overhead application rate nor how these issues influence the causes of misapplied capacity costs (under/over-applied fixed manufacturing overhead) typically reported as the Production Volume Variance. Specifically, discussion is lacking related to those misapplied capacity costs potentially caused variously by the presence of capacity that is not explicitly planned to be used, capacity that is currently unused but in the longer-term is planned to be used (due to anticipated growth), and capacity that is currently unused but in the shorter term is planned to be used due to seasonality. Determining if any of these three causes are contributing to misapplied capacity costs is critical, as there are important managerial accounting and financial accounting reporting implications associated with each. And while the relevant literature to be discussed offers support for these causal constructs, this paper extends this literature by developing a parsimonious and conceptually-based approach to permit a simultaneous partitioning of misapplied capacity costs into these causal categories. Further, this paper will identify the important conceptual differences among these three causes, how these differences warrant unique approaches for the managerial and financial reporting of information related to capacity costs and utilization, and needed changes to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles to facilitate more appropriate financial reporting in this area.