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Part V analyzes the details of how to assess materiality. It first tackles qualitative versus quantitative criteria and the role of professional judgment. It then analyzes the selection of quantitative threshold, to expand to the choice of benchmarks. It contrasts the whole financial statements with subaggregates, line items, and components.

Specific sections contrast IASB, FASB, SEC, and other guidance on materiality applied to comparative information, interim reporting, and segment reporting.

The section on estimates mingles complex guidance coming from accounting, auditing, and internal control over financial reporting to explain how the management can improve its assessment of materiality concerning estimates.

After explaining the techniques to move from individual to cumulative misstatements, the part tackles verification ex post, and finally summarizes the intricacies of whether immaterial misstatements are permissible and their consequences.

The literature on executive options has burgeoned over the past decade. While early literature tended to expound the benefits associated with the adoption of options plans, more recent literature has taken on a more cautionary tone. Recent empirical research has suggested a range of conditions under which the adoption of options plans might result in unanticipated outcomes. This paper adds to the literature by discussing options holding concentration, which we define as the proportion of options outstanding under a firm's executive options plan held by a firm's board and the top five non-board executives. We examine previous empirical literature on executive options plans and some of the incentive problems associated with the implementation of such plans, which have been reported in the literature. On the basis of these discussions, we discuss why it might plausibly be expected that options holding concentration could represent a variable with the power to explain the degree to which incentive problems are encountered by organisations, which employ executive options schemes. We report observed options holding concentration for a sample of Australian listed corporations between 1997 and 2002, but demonstrate that while significantly inversely associated with firm size, holdings concentration does not appear to be associated with factors which point towards organisational risk taking and cash payment policy choices. We discuss possible reasons for our findings and suggest potential future research extensions flowing from our work.

This chapter highlights the overwhelming situation of plastic pollution in the Nigerian tourism sector. While plastic waste pollution is detrimental to the ecological system, it also has a direct negative effect on Nigeria's economic sectors including tourism. Approximately, 8% of the world's carbon emissions are caused by tourism-related activities. Tourism activities have contributed enormously to the improper disposal of trash, raw sewage and toxic chemicals into Nigeria's environment. However, there is a lack of comprehensive initiative or policy to curb the gigantic waste pollution in Nigeria, specifically in the Nigerian tourism sector. This has caused more confusion among the consumers and the tourism practitioners. Therefore, this chapter outlines the current situation, the implication for the businesses and the responsibility of the stakeholders.

From the heaps of garbage in street corners and highways, to blocked drains and obstructed waterways, Nigerian cities continue to bear marks of environmental degradation occasioned by the business activities of manufacturers. Globally, the picture is no less different as landfills, oceans and beaches bear indubitable testimonies of plastic pollution. While the manufacturers smile to the bank, governments and municipal authorities struggle with their meagre resources to combat the colossal burden of plastic pollution they generated in the course of creating wealth. The use of non-biodegradable materials such as polythene in product packaging is the primary driver of manufacturing-induced environmental degradation in Nigerian cities and other cities of the world. Recent developments in commerce in Nigeria, such as the emergence of the mobile supermarket, are responsible for the geometric increase in street filthiness in the country. Developing strategic alliances amongst Nigerian manufacturers or between manufacturers and municipal authorities is key in ensuring a healthy environment while doing business. However, such alliances must take a clue from the Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) embodied in the environmental consciousness practised in local markets in Nigeria, hereafter referred to as the ‘market-place model’ for environmental stewardship. This model, when replicated in other economies across the globe, would significantly reduce the global burden of plastic wastes and the hazards they pose in the environment. Conscience repayment, provision of refuse collection points, recycling and green packaging are part of ways of operationalising this model in everyday business. Adopting the market-place model in building strategic alliances for environmental stewardship would afford Nigerian manufacturers, and indeed global manufacturers, financial and non-financial business benefits such as cost savings through eco-efficiency, enlightened self-interest and good corporate image.

This chapter presents a seven-part case developed for use in a graduate-level tax planning class. The case is organized in a taxpayer/business “life-cycle” approach. Over the semester the case follows a married couple as they consider a number of investments, start a business, and expand the business. As the case progresses, the couple faces increasingly complex tax and business issues. The couple eventually winds down their involvement in the business and begins to plan for their retirement years. This chapter also provides a review of behavioral tax research published in the top accounting journals over the period 2004–2013. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the case could be adapted by behavioral tax researchers in their research programs and perhaps by accounting firms in their training programs.

In this chapter, we first examine the distribution characteristics of firm performance across different competitive industry contexts and periodic economic conditions of growth, recession, and recovery. There is mounting evidence that the contours of accounting-based economic returns consistently display (extreme) left-skewed leptokurtic distributions with negative risk-return relationships, which implies the existence of many negative performance outliers and some positive outliers. We note how negative skewness, excess kurtosis, and inverse risk-return relationships prevail in industries with more intense competition and in economic growth scenarios where more innovative initiatives compete. As the study of outliers typically is ignored in mainstream management studies, we extract a total of 23 extreme performers using a conventional winsorization technique that identifies 16 negative and 7 positive outliers. We study the performance trajectories of these firms over the full period and find that negative performers typically operate in capital-intensive innovative industries whereas positive performers operate in activities that cater to prevailing demand conditions and expand the business in a balanced manner. The firms that under- and over-perform as measured by the financial return ratio both constitute smaller firms compared to the total sample and show how relative movements in the ratio numerator and denominator affect the recorded return measure. However, the negative outliers generally use their public listing to access capital for investment in more risky development efforts that require a certain scale to succeed and thereby limits their flexibility. The positive outliers appear to expand their business activities in incremental responses to evolving market demands as a way to enhance maneuverability and secure competitive advantage by honing their unique firm-specific capabilities.