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The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between political connections and corporate tax aggressiveness in Malaysia. In addition, this paper investigates the relationship between corporate governance variables and corporate tax aggressiveness. Next, the study investigates the mitigating role of corporate governance in the relationship between political connections and corporate tax aggressiveness.

The sample of this study is based on 2,538 firm-year observations during the 2000-2009 periods. This study employs a panel least square regression with both period and industry fixed effects. The study retrieved the corporate governance variables from the downloaded annual reports, whilst the remaining data were collected from Compustat Global.

This study finds that politically connected firms are more tax aggressive than non-connected firms. Furthermore, the study finds that large board size decreases the likelihood of tax aggressiveness and a non-linear relationship exists between institutional ownership and tax aggressiveness suggesting increase in monitoring as the ownership increases. However, the study finds no evidence to suggest that corporate governance mitigates the influence of political connections in promoting tax aggressiveness behavior. The findings suggest that the impact of political connections could outweigh the benefits of changes in corporate governance in Malaysia.

The data are not recent, but it reflects a rather longitudinal research period.

This paper extends the literature of tax research in Malaysia which is in its’ infancy stage. Furthermore, it investigates the role of political connections in tax-planning research.

This study aims to investigate whether board gender diversity is associated with corporate sustainability performance and whether industry-level product market competition moderates the effect of board gender diversity on corporate sustainability performance.

This study uses international data extracted from global ESG data set from Thomson Reuters (Refinitiv) database. Using data of 23,137 firm-year observations from 37 countries, the authors perform regression analyses to examine the hypotheses.

The findings show that firms with high board gender diversity exhibit high corporate sustainability performance. The authors also find firms in highly competitive industries to have low corporate sustainability performance. In highly competitive industries, the positive relationship between board gender diversity and corporate sustainability performance is weakened. The results are robust to various specification tests such as alternative measures for corporate sustainability performance, board gender diversity, product market competition and also the use of propensity score matching to address endogeneity issue. Overall, the results support the prediction that board diversity and product market competition play a substitutive role in influencing corporate sustainability performance.

This study offers empirical evidence that the appointment of female directors is a useful way to improve a firm’s corporate sustainability performance, hence, providing significant benefits in terms of stakeholders’ values and corporate reputation.

This study provides useful insights to investors and policymakers that intense industry competition might mitigate the role of board governance, particularly board gender diversity, in enhancing corporate sustainability performance.

Using an international data set, where the observations operate in various market and institutional differences, this study is able to extricate the positive impact of board gender diversity and product market competition on corporate sustainability performance. This study corroborates evidence that sustainability strategy and initiatives are reflections of integrated factors, including corporate governance as internal driver and market forces faced by firms as external driver.

This study aims to investigate external auditors’ whistleblowing intentions by applying the moderated multicomponent of the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), incorporating perceived organizational support (POS) and provides insights on the moderating effect of moral norm on the relationship between attitude and internal whistleblowing intentions.

Data was gathered using a questionnaire survey involving 274 external auditors in Malaysia and the data was analyzed using SmartPLS 3.2.9.

The results show that there are positive relationships between perceived behavioural control and POS with whistleblowing intentions, but there is no evidence to support the hypotheses related to attitude and subjective norm. The findings provide partial support for the capability of the multicomponent model of TPB in examining whistleblowing intentions. The results further show that moral norm moderates the relationship between attitude and whistleblowing intentions.

The findings can assist accounting professional bodies and policy makers in formulating strategies to enhance the practice and, consequently, the benefits of whistleblowing. The findings are also valuable to managers of audit firms in strategizing for ways to enhance whistleblowing intentions to encourage the audit staffs to report any wrongdoings done by their colleagues.

This study provides the perspective of whistleblowing intentions of external auditors in the institutional setting of an emerging market, Malaysia. Further, this study extends the TPB model in whistleblowing studies by applying a higher-order construct, incorporating POS as an additional determinant of whistleblowing intentions and considering moral norm as moderating the relationship between attitude and whistleblowing intentions.

This study aims to investigate whether auditor tenure has a significant influence on accounting quality and whether investor protection moderates the effect of auditor tenure on accounting quality.

This study uses weighted least squares regression on a sample of 77,855 firm-year observations from 36 countries during the period 2010–2016. This study uses the absolute value of performance-matched discretionary accruals to measure financial reporting quality.

This study finds that a longer auditor tenure is associated with higher accounting quality, thus supporting the knowledge effect arguments. The results on the joint effect of investor protection and auditor tenure show evidence of the substitutive effect of investor protection, where the positive impact of auditor tenure on accounting quality is weaker in a high investor-protection environment.

These findings provide input for policy implications involving the auditing profession. Regulators may need to weigh the costs and benefits of mandatory audit rotation because country-level institutional factors influence auditing regulations and practices, as well as the auditors’ behaviors.

This study adds to the limited, albeit important, evidence on the joint effect of auditor tenure and country-level governance on accounting quality. The authors respond to the call by Brooks et al. (2017) for more evidence on the role of audits on financial reporting outcomes across various legal institutions for creating effective policies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of board of directors and audit committee effectiveness on the level of internet financial reporting (IFR) disclosure practices.

The sample consists of 152 listed financial companies in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Based on agency theory, the authors posit that board of directors and audit committee effectiveness influence corporate IFR disclosure practice. Content analysis approach, based on an un-weighted index of 35 IFR items is used to measure the level of IFR disclosure. Thus, multiple regression analysis is utilized to analyse the results of this paper.

The results show that board of directors and audit committee effectiveness has significant influence on the level of IFR disclosure.

One potential limitation of this paper is that the sample is drawn only from the GCC listed financial companies. Therefore, the findings cannot be generalized to other than the financial institutions.

The finding(s) highlights the importance of board of directors and audit committee characteristics in corporate governance and in the development of financial markets that foster IFR disclosure.

This paper extends previous IFR disclosure studies by considering both the role of board of directors and audit committee effectiveness score in examining IFR disclosure.

The purpose of this paper is to present a review of literature on fraud with a specific focus on small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Specifically, it aims to provide further knowledge on recent developments in fraud research and offers suggestions for future research.

This paper systematically reviews the fraud literature, by organising them into five sections; definition, elements, theories, factors and prevention mechanisms.

The most common factors of fraud in SMEs are the low morale among employees and weak internal control within the organisations. Nonetheless, research on fraud involving SMEs is limited, albeit the importance of SMEs to the economy.

This paper encapsulates the importance of research on fraud in SMEs by offering directions for future research. Among others, future studies might indicate the link between corruption, financing sources and innovation of SMEs, especially within the context of an emerging country and reveal the cost of the criminal justice system to identify more accurately the cost of fraud in SMEs.

The focus on fraud in SMEs and the recent period of study offer a foundation for future research directed at the factors of fraud and the prevention mechanisms. Future research can further explore and broaden the literature on fraud involving SMEs through research that focuses on the impact of fraud and the types of control mechanisms that suit the SMEs. Greater understanding of fraud in the SMEs allows in identifying the best approach to prevent and detect fraud for small businesses with limited resources.

This paper examines whether financial distress is associated with tax avoidance and whether the COVID-19 pandemic moderates such association.

The sample covers 38,958 firm-year observations from 32 countries during the period 2015–2020. Financial distress is measured using the ZSCORE by Altman (1968), while tax avoidance is based on the book-tax difference.

Financially distressed firms exhibit low tax avoidance pre- and during the pandemic periods. The authors find higher tax avoidance during the pandemic compared to the pre-pandemic period, but the pandemic enhances the negative relationship between financial distress and tax avoidance.

The study offers evidence on how financial distress drives firms to engage in more tax avoidance when firms globally encountered various levels of financial difficulty sparked by the economic challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The findings provide insights to policymakers on the need to monitor and incentivise financially distressed firms, especially during economic challenges due to pandemic.

This study adds to the limited, albeit important, evidence on the joint effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and financial distress on tax avoidance.

This paper investigates whether board gender diversity and the strength of auditing and reporting standards are associated with analysts' forecast accuracy and whether the strength of auditing and reporting standards moderates the association between board gender diversity and analysts' forecast accuracy.

The sample covers 24,086 firm-year observations from 37 countries from 2009 to 2018. The data were obtained from various sources: earnings forecast data from the Institutional Brokers' Estimate System (IBES) database; board gender diversity and financial data from Thomson Reuters Fundamentals; and country-level data from World Economic Forum database. The authors measure board gender diversity using four proxies namely, the proportion of women directors on the board, a dummy variable for board with at least one women director, BLAU measurement corresponds to the proportion of group females and males using the formula adopted from the Hirschman-Herfindahl index (Hirschman, 1964) and the proportion of the number of women executives over the total number of directors. The study also uses a series of specification tests using alternative measures for each variable and controlling the global financial crisis and endogeneity issue.

Firms with higher board gender diversity have higher analysts' forecast accuracy. Compared to countries with weak auditing and reporting standards, the authors find firms in countries with strong auditing and reporting standards have more accurate forecasts. Further, the positive relationship between the board gender diversity and analysts' forecast accuracy is weaker for firms in countries with strong auditing and reporting standards, as compared to firms in countries with weak auditing and reporting standards.

This study found new evidence on the effect of women directorships on analyst forecasts and this relationship varies between levels of the strength of auditing and reporting standards, which was not addressed in prior studies.

This study highlights the importance of strengthening the policy on getting more women on board and the continuous efforts to enhance the strength of auditing and reporting standards of a country as valuable strategies to enhance the quality of analyst forecasts.

This is the first study that employs the international dataset to examine the moderating effect of the strength of auditing and reporting standards on the relationship between board gender diversity and analysts' forecast accuracy.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an extension of the Corporate Governance Reporting Initiative (CGI) 2004, which reports on Malaysia's first corporate governance ratings. Characteristics of firms with high and low scores in the corporate governance ratings are analysed by comparing companies based on their corporate governance ranking as reported in the CGI.

Firms are classified into those at the top 50 percent and the bottom 50 percent of the corporate governance ratings list to examine whether there are any differences in the characteristics of firms in both classified samples. The characteristics of firms that are being examined are firms' profitability, leverage, growth, market valuation, size, age, ownership structure and countries of operation based on the Logit analysis.

The result shows that firm size has a strong influence with corporate governance ratings, but not so for other variables tested.

This study analyses only eight corporate characteristics. There are other measures that can represent firms' size such as market capitalization.

It is hoped that the traits found from the analysis will be able to provide additional information concerning corporate governance to interested parties. The characteristics revealed may probably be found to be essential elements in the development of effective and efficient corporate governance structure. The study could also help corporations in their short‐ and long‐term strategies.

This study bridges the gap of previous studies by using a complete set of governance standards on the analysis and directly identifies firms with certain scores of corporate governance and addresses issues related to these exceptional companies.

This study aims to examine the association between environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance and cash holdings, as well as whether this association is moderated by Shariah-compliant status. The aim was to test the joint effect of two ethical precepts, namely, the ESG and Shariah-compliant status, in explaining variations in cash holdings.

A sample set that consisted of 9,244 firm-year observations from 25 countries from 2016 to 2020 was analysed using regression analysis. Firm-level data were sourced from Thomson Reuters and Refinitiv databases, while country-level data were derived from the World Bank and Hofstede Insights websites.

Firms with greater ESG performances were found to have higher cash holdings. The positive association between ESG performance and cash holdings was greater for Shariah-compliant firms compared to non-Shariah-compliant firms. In support of the stakeholder theory, the evidence indicated that Shariah-compliant firms with higher ESG commitments also have higher cash holdings as part of their corporate strategy.

These findings provided further comprehension to investors that ESG practices among Shariah-compliant firms are essential information during investment decision-making processes.

These findings highlighted ethical corporate practices through two frameworks, namely, ESG commitment and Shariah compliance; hence, contributing towards strategies to reach the Sustainable Development Goal 16 of promoting just, peaceful and inclusive societies.

This study has focused on the motives for cash holdings by considering the ethical precepts embodying ESG and Shariah compliance to uphold the positive impact of high cash reserves.