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This paper is concerned with financial statement disclosure of environmental liabilities by companies that are coming to the US securities market for the first time in an initial public offering (IPO). This specific disclosure type has not been previously reported on in the accounting literature. Compares 26 IPO firms identified as potentially responsible parties (PRPs) in Superfund sites with a closely matched (on the attributes of industry classification and asset size) group of publicly held PRPs. The objective is to observe whether there is a differentially higher level of environmental disclosure by the IPO group during the year of heightened securities market scrutiny as the IPO occurs. Data are collected through content analysis of annual reports and SEC Form 10‐Ks. The results from this study show that no different level of environmental disclosure was identified in the matched‐pair sample. The more intense inspection, the higher stakes in an IPO situation and the enhanced due diligence procedures are of no apparent consequence in simulating a greater amount or quality of environmental disclosure. Strict disclosure mandates and expected public scrutiny do not appear to ensure the anticipated level of accounting statement disclosure concerning environmental liabilities.

The United States defense industry has had a long history of unethical and illegal business practices. Recent polls find that most Americans believe that their nation’s weapon acquisition system is one of the worst managed activities in the public or private sectors and the defense industry is neither efficient nor honestly managed. Although the defense acquisition process has been the subject of many reform efforts, it is reasonable to ask whether these reform efforts have had any success. The Defense Industry Initiative on Business Ethics and Conduct, commonly known as DII, is the defense industry’s selfgoverned program responding to the concern regarding ethical business practices in defense procurement. This study is to assess the Defense Industry Initiative on Business Ethics and Conduct in an attempt to find the perceived impact of this self-governed compliance program.

A decision of the US Supreme Court to require enforcement of an environmental standard in the cotton textile industry provides a unique opportunity to observe the market impact of social‐cost disclosures. This research examines the reaction of investors to an exogenous factor which has an impact on a particular group of firms. A valuation‐effects paradigm is applied in the context of the standard market model to evaluate the aggregate assessment of investors to the news that a costly new Occupational Safety and Health Administration requirement would be enforced. Risk‐adjusted returns in a sample of cotton textile firms were observed to decline as a negative investor revaluation occurred. To determine if ex ante disclosure of the potential financial impact of this new environmental standard affected announcement‐period market reaction, subsamples were developed on the basis of the type of reporting provided. The results tend to support the view that market pre‐conditioning occurred. Differential impacts were observable, with less negative investor reaction to quantitative disclosures than to other types of information provided by sample companies. These results suggest that emphasis should be placed on quantitative social‐cost disclosures, and that regulatory authorities might look more closely at present disclosure guidelines to determine if they allow too much reporting variability.

This paper was motivated by the current debate over the voluntary approach to environmental disclosures in corporate annual reports and assesses the effectiveness of the current policy of voluntarism in the UK. A brief review of the relevant theories, which explain why managers might choose to voluntarily provide environmental responsibility information to parties outside the organisation, is presented. With this background, the paper then questions whether the UK government’s faith in voluntarism and the pursuit of best practice will be enough to generate any real change in current environmental reporting practices. We argue that voluntarism is not effective and that there is an urgent need to introduce strict governmental regulations on the information that must be disclosed and the form in which it should be presented in corporate annual reports as have been established in several other countries. In addition, further consideration is needed to achieve reforms in academic accounting education in order to improve corporate accountability and transparency in corporate annual reports. Organisations need to respond to the growing demands for corporate social and environmental responsibility and this will be possible with the support of an accounting profession that takes a more proactive approach to engaging with stakeholders. For this to happen, we need to rethink the focus of accounting and business education. We must move away from the dominant model, which treats accountancy as a set of techniques, towards a more holistic approach which recognises the social and environmental impacts of organisational activity.

As a consequence of the global financial and economic crisis, the European Commission recently reformed the audit market. One objective was to restore public trust in the auditing profession and thus to enhance the audit function. This study investigates whether perceptions of auditor independence and audit quality are influenced by audit firm rotation, auditor retention and joint audits, because regulators argue that these instruments can improve auditor independence and audit quality. Therefore, we conduct an experiment with bank directors and institutional investors in Germany. The results indicate a negative main effect for joint audits on perceived auditor independence, and that a rotation cycle of 24 years marginally significantly impairs participant perceptions of audit quality, compared to a rotation cycle of only ten years. Besides the main effects, planned contrast tests suggest a negative interaction between rotation and joint audit on participant perceptions of auditor independence. Moreover, a negative interaction effect is revealed between rotation after 24 years and retention on perceptions of audit quality. It is particularly noteworthy that we failed to identify a positive impact of the regulatory measures taken or supported by the European Commission on perceptions of auditor independence and audit quality.

Environmental Accounting (EA) practices have developed rapidly in some countries and have a positive impact on their organizations. Sustainability report (SR) as an indicator of EA practices helps company gain a better reputation and it is set by management. However, some ASEAN countries including Indonesia do not have relevant accounting standards on the environment. EA practice is still not widely known in Indonesia, although, internationally there have been standards that provide guidelines for aspect of the environment such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). Another aspect in GRI is remuneration. Remuneration is part of personnel cost which is a motivation about the positive effects of EA practices to disclose management concern. This research introduces a tool to evaluate a remuneration structure and the consistency of EA practices in the Sustainability Report.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether corporate community involvement disclosures (CCID) in annual reports can be construed as a measure of corporate community development (CCD) or a mere signal of corporate social responsibility (CSR) observance.

Using content analysis and a quality score index, the study examined a panel data set covering the period from 1999 to 2008. The data was collected from a sample of 270 annual reports of 27 UK companies taken from the top 100 companies for corporate responsibility (BITC ranking, 2008). The research framework involves the use of signalling theory to investigate the information content of CCID.

It is found that the volume of corporate community disclosure (CCID) has a significant association with its total quality score (TQS) although the impact was found to be very small. CCID was also found to be strongly and positively associated with the volume of total CSR disclosed in annual reports. Hence the quantity and quality of CCID in annual reports increased significantly as the quantity of CSR disclosure also increased. Furthermore, the TQS was found to respond to company size and Corporate Governance measures such as audit committee size and board composition, and the existence of standalone CSR Reports, while other measures of public pressure such as leverage, profitability and industrial sector were not statistically significantly related with TQS.

This paper contributes to CSR literature in general and CCID literature in particular. The originality stems from the fact that it employs a signalling framework and a panel study approach as opposed to cross‐sectional only or time‐series only data to examine a less researched social disclosure – corporate community involvement.

The study analyses de jure disclosure harmony between Australia and Singapore by examining selected disclosure requirements from the statutes, stock exchange listing rules and five accounting standards. Empirical evidence as to Australian and Singaporean companies' de facto disclosure is provided. Two disclosure indices, specifically the no‐violation‐for‐non‐disclosure (NVND) index and the violation‐for‐non‐disclosure (VND), were used to assess the extent of company's disclosure of the selected requirements contained within their respective country's rules.

Previous research has highlighted a contradiction in regard to environmental reporting in South Africa. Managers, who can influence decisions regarding disclosure, express the view that more environmental reporting is needed, yet very little such reporting is done. A questionnaire was sent to every company listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) with the request that the financial director should complete it. The questionnaire set out to establish whether managers are still as positive about environmental reporting as reported in previous research findings and, furthermore, to determine the reasons for the dearth of environmental reporting. Managers are still as positive as before about environmental reporting. The reasons for not reporting range from the contention that data is not available, that there are no legal requirements and that there is no demand for the data to the contention that it is not applicable to the particular industry and that costs exceed benefits. Most respondents do not regard the fear of liability to be a very important reason for non‐disclosure. The most important reason for non‐disclosure is that there is no legal requirement in respect of disclosure. This reason, together with the positive attitude of directors towards environmental reporting in general and towards reporting on a compulsory basis in particular, makes a strong case for the introduction of legislation in this regard. The introduction of legislation could be achieved by amending the Fourth Schedule of the Companies’ Act or the introduction by The South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA) of a statement of Generally Accepted Accounting Practice (GAAP) on environmental disclosure.

The purpose of this paper is to survey the research methods employed in the extant environmental accounting literature, finding few experimental studies. The need for more experimentation in the literature is discussed, as well as how experiments' unique methodological advantages can help address important environmental accounting issues. These issues culminate in a proposed model for conducting experimental environmental accounting research.

A synthesis of the environmental accounting literature emphasizes the research methods, and, advantages and disadvantages of each method, as well as why and how experimental designs can contribute to the environmental accounting literature. Finally, the paper proposes and analyzes a framework for conducting environmental accounting experiments.

Experiments can provide unique contributions to the environmental accounting literature. Relative to traditional accounting information, environmental accounting information comprises lower levels of user familiarity which may hinder effective processing of these non‐traditional data. These characteristics make the organizational display of these data, and their combination with non‐environmental metrics, a particular and unique concern. The proposed model considers the impact of environmental strategy on the implementation of environmental information systems, which in turn influences evaluation effectiveness of decisions based on environmental accounting information. Stakeholder influences, management communication of environmental issues, and evaluation scales also influence these relationships.

The model assumes environmental information generates from within the entity (i.e. private firms, public agencies, etc.). Future research can enhance and/or modify the framework to include information design and capture from non‐entity end‐users (e.g. stakeholders), as well as empirically test the model's relationships.

The framework provides factors to consider to design more effective environmental accounting information systems. Also, the model's factors should aid researchers in developing robust experimental designs for environmental accounting studies.

This is the first paper to propose a framework for conducting experimental environmental accounting research.