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An assimilation and a synthesis of the major General Accounting Office (GAO) reports released on the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for calendar year 2002 reveal a variety of tax administration problems. An analysis of the GAO reports also suggests that the IRS might be a contributor to the non-compliance problem. Additionally, Congresses and Administrations have not facilitated meaningful improvements.

While the GAO reports generally attempt to portray the ongoing modernization efforts within the IRS favorably, the weaknesses identified suggest that significant tax administration problems exist. This article presents a detailed analysis of the GAO overall report on the 2002-filing season and assesses GAO reports and testimonies that contain IRS in their titles.

This study proposes targeted modernization of the Department of Defense (DoD's) Joint Forces Ammunition Logistics information system by implementing the optimized innovative information technology open architecture design and integrating Radio Frequency Identification Device data technologies and real-time optimization and control mechanisms as the critical technology components of the solution. The innovative information technology, which pursues the focused logistics, will be deployed in 36 months at the estimated cost of $568 million in constant dollars. We estimate that the Systems, Applications, Products (SAP)-based enterprise integration solution that the Army currently pursues will cost another $1.5 billion through the year 2014; however, it is unlikely to deliver the intended technical capabilities.

Mandatory auditor firm rotation (mandatory rotation) has been a controversial issue in the United States for many decades. Mandatory rotation has been considered at various times as a means of improving auditor independence. For example, in the United States, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) has considered mandatory rotation as a solution to the independence problem (PCAOB, 2011) and the European Parliament approved legislation that will require mandatory rotation in the near future (Council of European Union, 2014). The concept of implementing a mandatory rotation policy has been encouraged by some constituents of audited financial statements and rejected by other constituents of audited financial statements. Although there are apparent pros and cons of such a policy, the developmental process of such a policy in this country has not necessarily been an open-democratic, objective process. Universal mandatory rotation may or may not be the ideal solution; however, an open-democratic, objective process is needed to facilitate the development of a solution that considers the needs of all major stakeholders of audited financial statements – not simply accounting firms and public companies, but also investors. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine key issues relating to mandatory rotation and to encourage and stimulate future research and ongoing dialogue regarding this issue, in spite of efforts by certain constituents to silence the issue. This paper provides an overview of the various reasons, including practical, theoretical, political, and self-motivated reasons, why a mandatory rotation policy has not been implemented in the United States in order to address the potential conflict of interest between the auditor and client. This paper will also discuss how some deliberations of mandatory rotation have been flawed. The paper concludes with a summary of key issues along with two approaches for regulators, policy makers, and academics to consider as ways to improve the process and address auditor independence. The authors are not advocating for any specific solution; however, we are advocating for a more objective, unified approach and for the dialogue regarding auditor rotation to continue.

This chapter proposes an optimized innovative information technology as a means for achieving operational functionalities of real-time portable electronic health records, system interoperability, longitudinal health-risks research cohort and surveillance of adverse events infrastructure, and clinical, genome regions – disease and interventional prevention infrastructure. In application to the Dod-VA (Department of Defense and Veteran's Administration) health information systems, the proposed modernization can be carried out as an “add-on” expansion (estimated at $288 million in constant dollars) or as a “stand-alone” innovative information technology system (estimated at $489.7 million), and either solution will prototype an infrastructure for nation-wide health information systems interoperability, portable real-time electronic health records (EHRs), adverse events surveillance, and interventional prevention based on targeted single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) discovery.

This paper considers a class of parametric models with nonparametric autoregressive errors. A new test is established and studied to deal with the parametric specification of the nonparametric autoregressive errors with either stationarity or nonstationarity. Such a test procedure can initially avoid misspecification through the need to parametrically specify the form of the errors. In other words, we estimate the form of the errors and test for stationarity or nonstationarity simultaneously. We establish asymptotic distributions of the proposed test. Both the setting and the results differ from earlier work on testing for unit roots in parametric time series regression. We provide both simulated and real-data examples to show that the proposed nonparametric unit root test works in practice.

Narrow, managerially centered notions of organizational culture remain hegemonic, marginalizing richer, anthropological approaches as well as efforts to understand how the beliefs and practices of organizations are fundamentally shaped by the wider societal dynamics within which they are embedded. In this paper, the authors draw upon recent efforts to explore the interface of scholarship on practice and the institutional logics perspective to highlight the utility of a practice-driven institutional approach to the study of organizational culture that brings society back in. Empirically, the authors present a longitudinal case study of a Chinese private enterprise, and analyze how the unfolding dynamics of a strong community logic increasingly affected by a rising market logic, shaped the formation of political coalitions internally and externally as organizational members aimed to maintain truces between the push and pull of logics over a period of 22 years. Through an analysis of seven episodes that we conceptualize as “cultural encounters,” the authors find that a combination of compartmentalization and overall integration of logics contributes to provisional truces, and that people in the same cohort who share common geographic socialization are more likely to form allies. Our aim is to encourage future scholars to study how societal beliefs and practices work their way into organizations in a variety of explicit as well as more mundane, hidden ways.

John Kwoka’s Mergers, Merger Control, and Remedies is a meta-analysis of “retrospective” academic studies of consummated mergers and other horizontal arrangements. Based on this meta-analysis, Kwoka strongly criticizes federal enforcement policies, claiming that the agencies permit far too many anticompetitive mergers to go unchallenged, and are far too willing to accept remedies that fail to prevent a significant loss of competition. Kwoka claims further that this excessive leniency is the culmination of a trend reflecting deliberate policy choices made over the last several decades.

In a forthcoming critique, Vita and Osinski challenge Kwoka’s analysis and his conclusions, identifying serious flaws in the size, construction, and composition of his sample, and in the statistical analysis of the data drawn from that sample. In a published response to Vita and Osinski, Professor Kwoka offers a number of objections and counter-arguments. In this rejoinder, I respond to Professor Kwoka.

Forests too thick with fuels that are too continuously spread to resist fire are common throughout the west. After a century or more of actively working to suppress fire across the landscape, we now recognize that fire is a part of our forests, shrublands, and range, and that it will come whether we wish it or not. At last, managers must realize forests cannot be fire-proofed (DellaSala, Williams, Williams, & Franklin, 2004). We must work with fire rather than against it.

Although accounting professors around the globe have addressed various social aspects of accounting, very rarely does that research address the concerns of students. This is despite the fact that students are the focus of the educational mission of most universities. In an effort to address this gap, this chapter extends the field of social accounting to an issue critical to students: the cost of accounting textbooks in the United States. Textbook cost is drawing increasing attention from public interest groups and government regulators as costs are growing at a more rapid rate than many other costs, and constitute a significant portion of the total cost of obtaining a higher education degree. For accounting students, these costs are exacerbated by the fact that accounting textbooks are among the most expensive of any major, and they are being revised with increasing frequency – which eliminates students’ ability to buy less expensive used books – often with little or no discernible benefit to students. We argue that in some subfields of accounting – especially managerial/cost and introductory courses – topics are relatively stable, and that frequent textbook revisions are unnecessarily costly for our students, many of whom, along with their families, are making significant financial sacrifices to earn their degrees. In this study, we provide background on the textbook pricing issue, include data from a survey of accounting faculty demonstrating that they consider the revisions too frequent, document the increasing frequency of accounting textbook revisions over recent decades, analyze content in a leading accounting textbook, and discuss options for reducing the cost of accounting textbooks, including following student activists’ lead in advocating for open-source, free textbooks.

This chapter re-examines the determinants of health care expenditure (HCE), using a panel of 32 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries from 1990 to 2012. In particular, a panel semiparametric technique (i.e., a partially linear model) is employed, with cross-sectional dependence allowed. Beside the study of coefficients, this chapter investigates the trending functions of HCE. After the common and individual trends of HCE are estimated via semiparametric methods, the authors calibrate them with polynomial specifications, leading to out-of-sample forecasting. The validities of the calibration are tested as well. Contrary to those studies that do not take into account time series properties, our finding suggests that medical care is not a luxury commodity. Other determinants, such as public financing, and the supply of doctors, are all positively related to HCE. Moreover, the calibrated trending models perform well in out-of-sample forecasting.