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In 2012, the New York Department of Financial Services threatened to revoke Standard Chartered Bank’s U.S. license for alleged money laundering violations involving Iran. The bank’s settlement with US regulators and law enforcement cost the bank approximately $1.099 billion. In 2013, as a signal that no bank was too big to jail, the Holding Individuals Accountable and Deterring Money Laundering Act was introduced into the U.S. Congress. We focus on a clinical examination of the Standard Chartered money laundering case and examine the role of the US regulators and law enforcement in the settlement.

During the 1990s the value to an intending professional accountant of undertaking a period of liberal (general) studies was promoted internationally by a number of individuals and organisations, including the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) and the New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants (the “Institute”). The Institute significantly changed its admissions policy for Chartered Accountants in 1996 and one change was to require four years of degree level study with a compulsory liberal studies component. This study surveys the perceptions of New Zealand accounting practitioners on the impact of this compulsory liberal component. The results of this study demonstrate that there is little support from accounting practitioners for IFAC’s claim that liberal education “can contribute significantly to the acquisition of professional skills”, including intellectual, personal and communication skills. In addition, the majority of respondents did not perceive any improvements in the professional skills of the staff that had qualified under the Institute’s current admissions policy. However, any perceived improvements were mainly attributed to the Institute’s admissions policy change. Notwithstanding the lack of support for the assertion that liberal education develops professional skills, there is a strong belief by respondents in the value of liberal education for intending professional accountants.

Discusses the histories of the first 60 years of the three societies of Scottish chartered accountants and suggests that their relationships were based on consultation, agreement and pursuance of joint policies. Examines the original records and hitherto unreported materials which reveal that there was significant stress and tension among the societies and with the political and administrative authorities. Makes clear that the Edinburgh society exercised dominance, despite the existence of schisms within its own membership which are not discernible from its official records, which were maintained on a highly selective basis. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Glasgow and Aberdeen societies began to challenge the Edinburgh dominance and proposed the implementation of new institutional structures, which created eventually a more unified profession in Scotland. The Glasgow and Aberdeen initiatives were motivated by exogenous pressures, which ultimately the Edinburgh society was unable to resist.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the reflective identity work of a white female chartered accountant, scholar and academic manager, regarding the intersectional transformations of gender and race as well as leadership within the South African accounting profession over four decades.

The theoretical lens of intersectionality is applied through an autoethnographic approach. Multiple layers of personal experiences and observations are interpreted through identity work of leadership provided and received. Autoethnographic data are substantiated and contextualised through the researchers’ sense-making, official and scholarly sources.

Sustainable transformation of the accounting profession requires a deepened understanding of the interconnections of the personal, structural and systemic areas within unique contexts. Leadership, as provided and received, must be included within the intersectional orientations. Intersectional orientations become then more significant for understanding progressive changes of the demographic profile of the accounting profession not only in South Africa but also in other countries. The transformation interventions aimed at affirming high-quality black African, coloured and female candidates to the South African accounting profession are founded on the principles of social justice. A sustained reframing of the demographic profile of a profession is possible through accelerated and well-funded collaborative transformation interventions enhancing intentional structural changes of the membership pipeline.

The possible limitations of this study lie in the contextual nature of the material and findings and the lens of the specific theory.

The understanding of the practice of interventions aiming at transforming the country-specific demographic profile of a scarce skills profession such as the accountancy profession.

The originality of this paper lies in the application of an intersectional theoretical lens that argues for leadership as a dimension alongside age, gender and race in an autoethnographic sense making of the transformation of the South African accounting profession.

To appraise progress towards “the professional project” for the public relations profession in the UK using the Royal Charter application as a pivotal assessment point in the journey.

Primary and secondary, qualitative research, with participant observation and chronological and thematic analysis of archival documents at the time of the Charter process: 2003 to 2005. Two expert interviews were also conducted for a view on progress. The study is contextualised within the professions literature and the 2019 State of the Profession study undertaken by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.

The Institute faced significant challenges during the Charter application raised by Institutions such as the Government Department for Education and Skills, including the diversity of the profession, standards of education and training, practitioner standards, including ethical, as indicated by their levels of membership and commitment to ongoing professional development. These challenges remain.

Diversity, social acceptance, qualifications and professional progress provide an important, ongoing research agenda.

Social acceptance, qualifications and professional progress remain elusive for the practice and more radical action is required to achieve progress.

The profession is making limited progress towards legitimacy. Continued press ambivalence, recent scandals, such as the Bell Pottinger affair in South Africa and jurisdictional infringement by other professions continue to threaten its attempts to move towards social closure.

This is the first academic article to chronicle the charter journey using the original documentation as source materials and the first to review progress towards the goals that chartered status signified for public relations.

This chapter explores the political economy of banking in Texas at the turn of the last century. The empirical work sheds light on why Texans voted to allow the chartering of banks by the state government. The evidence shows that county-level voting patterns for state-chartered banks were significantly related to business interests, consumer interests, agricultural activity, and the presence of existing national banks. The work also shows that the first counties to receive the new state banks were associated with higher agricultural activity, larger population size, and the presence of existing national banks. By examining the vote and the location of early entrants in state banking, this chapter contributes to the literature exploring the historical development of state-chartered banking and the dual-banking system in the US.

The present work aimed to enhance the understanding of professional turnover intentions of accounting professionals by exploring their attitudes towards this phenomenon in an emerging economy (Tunisia).

An exploratory research was conducted using a narrative approach (episodic interviewing) after having interviewed accounting professionals. Data were analysed with the thematic coding method using NVivo software based on the push-pull-mooring (PPM) framework. Based on this analysis, four types of professionals were identified.

The interconnections among PPM factors, which are different from one type of professionals to another, play a vital role in whether a professional intends to leave the accounting profession or not. All four types of professionals perceived unpleasant facets of the public practice environment (push factors) and manifested a tendency to switch to available job opportunities (pull factors). Nevertheless, the latitude for profession change, for the third and the fourth types who perceived the professional experience differently, is restricted by mooring factors. That is not the case for the first type of professionals who have already left public accounting and the second type who intend to quit the profession, as we did not find any mooring factors.

This study explored the attitudes of accounting professionals towards professional turnover intention. A deeper insight into the views of the academics and the Ordre des Experts Comptables de Tunisie (OECT) might help understand this phenomenon.

Understanding the relative impact of push, pull and mooring allows the accounting professionals to determine their attitudes towards the intention to leave the profession. This enables firms to develop more effective programmes to retain valued accounting human resources. The findings highlight that the professional associations should promote the values the profession brings to the community through nationwide public awareness campaigns and enhance career opportunities by providing more branches of activity within the profession.

The paper responds to calls for further examination of factors behind professional turnover intention at a time when high rates of turnover were observed among accounting professionals. Also, the cultural context of Tunisia helps explain our findings.

This paper reports on an exploratory study examining factors which may affect the career choice of accounting students. Although prior studies have examined factors affecting the choice of an accounting major, few studies have examined factors affecting the choice of career of accounting graduates. This study found that more students aspired to become Certified Practising Accountants (CPAs) of the Australian Society of Certified Practicing Accountants (ASCPA) rather than Associate Chartered Accountants (ACAs) of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia (ICAA) This study also found that there were differences in career aspirations between males and females, and between students at different universities. Female students perceived gender discrimination would have a greater adverse effect on their future careers compared with male students, particularly in chartered accounting and industry; and overseas students were more conscious of discrimination than Australian students. There is also some evidence that Big 6 selection practices are perceived as biased.

The severe shortage of black chartered accountants (CAs) in South Africa highlights the need for equity in the development of future accountants. However, despite the transformation initiatives that had already been introduced by then, at the end of 2001, black CAs were still grossly underrepresented in the membership of the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA). Furthermore, black trainee accountants still experienced cultural and social alienation, hostility and mistrust in their ability, resulting in their not reaching their full potential. This article investigates the progress made in transforming the accountancy profession in South Africa since 2001. It surveyed the obstacles black trainee accountants still encounter, using a questionnaire that took into account issues identified from the literature reviewed. A number of recommendations are made on the basis of the findings. The results show that black accountants are still a minority in the accountancy profession. Black trainees currently believe that they receive very good training; however, they also believe it is more difficult to be a black trainee than a white trainee. Different cultural backgrounds, a lack in social skills and race‐based perceptions were identified as the key obstacles they currently encounter.

A royal charter of incorporation imposing public benefit/social responsibilities established the privately owned British South Africa Company (BSAC), in return for power to exploit a huge territory using low-cost local labour. This study explores the dual principal–agent problem of how the BSAC used annual report narratives to report on its conflicting economic responsibilities to investors versus its public benefit charter responsibilities to the British Crown.

Having digitised the dataset, the research analyses narratives from 29 BSAC annual reports spanning a continuous 35-year royal charter period, using computer-aided keyword content analysis to identify economic-orientated versus public benefit-orientated annual report narratives. The research analyses how the annual report narratives shifted according to four key contextual periods by reference to the changing influence of private investors versus the British Crown.

There are two key findings. First, economic primacy. At no point do public benefit disclosures outweigh economic disclosures. Second, the BSAC's meso-corporate context and macro-social/political context can explain patterns in public benefit disclosures. The motivation for producing public benefit information is not altruism. Rather, commercial interests motivate disclosure. The BSAC used its annual reports to sustain what proved ultimately unsustainable – royal charter-style colonialism.

This accounting history study contributes to an understanding of corporate narrative reporting using one of the earliest known cases of such analysis and shows how accounting plays a central role in facilitating a company in sustaining its interests. This 100-year lookback may be a portend of the future for modern-day annual report corporate social responsibility narratives in, say, mining and oil and gas company corporate reports, especially if these natural resources run out.