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The legal profession is vulnerable to abuse for the purposes of money laundering and terrorist financing. According to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), that vulnerability justified updated global recommendations that urge countries to require lawyers, notaries and other independent legal professionals – including sole practitioners, partners and employed professionals within law firms – to identify, assess and manage the money laundering and terrorist financing risks associated with their services and to ensure that they have appropriate mechanisms in place to provide risk assessment information to competent authorities. Those recommendations proved contentious, with concerns raised by both legal academics and legal professional bodies about the implications of certain aspects of the requirements for the principle of lawyer–client confidentiality. Despite those concerns, many countries have introduced or amended regulatory regimes to extend their application to the legal sector to comply with the FATF’s standards. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate surrounding the extension of AML/CTF obligations to the legal profession.

This paper considers three jurisdictions – the UK, Israel and Australia – at different stages in their journey towards compliance with the FATF’s anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist financing (CTF) standards for the legal profession. While the UK has a long-established and well-embedded AML regulatory framework for legal professionals, Australia remains non-compliant with the FATF standards. Israel occupies a position between these two ends of the spectrum: following criticism of the omission of lawyers from its AML/CTF regime, Israel implemented due diligence rules for the profession. In 2018, Israel was found to be partially compliant with the relevant FATF recommendations.

It argues that although there are challenges involved, there are also important benefits. Therefore, Australia should act to implement its proposed changes sooner rather than later. Its persistent failure to appropriately address globally recognised areas of vulnerability leaves Australia open to integrity abuse. In addition, if the government delays addressing this issue until pressure from the FATF (such as deadlines for compliance and, if necessary, a finding of non-compliance) forces it to comply, this may tarnish Australia’s reputation, threaten its access to international financial markets and adversely affect the legitimacy and effectiveness of its AML/CTF regime.

Originality in this context refers to the distinctiveness and uniqueness of a paper’s content and approach. In this case, the originality lies in the fact that there is no other existing paper that addresses the topic of three common-law jurisdictions at various stages of their progression towards aligning with the FATF AML/CTF standards, specifically within the context of the legal profession. Furthermore, the timeliness of this paper is underscored by the fact that multiple jurisdictions are currently deliberating their positions on the focus of this paper. This adds to its originality and relevance, as it addresses a gap in the literature while also contributing to the ongoing discourse surrounding compliance with FATF’s standards.

This paper aims to examine the association between money laundering (ML)/terrorist financing (TF) risks (hereafter, money laundering risks) and democratic governance across 117 countries.

A cross-sectional design was used to examine the association between ML risks and democratic governance by a quantitative approach. The findings are based on annual ratings of 117 countries on ML/TF risks and democracy while controlling for criminality and peace. The data was compiled from the Basel Anti-Money Laundering/Countering Financing Terrorism Risks Index, the Economic Intelligence Unit (Democracy Index), the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crimes (Criminality Index) and the Institute for Economics and Peace Index for 2020.

A multiple linear regression model found a statistically significant negative association between democratic governance and ML risks (B = −0.354, t = −7.454, p = <0.001) and a significant positive association between criminality and ML risks (B = 0.242, t = 2.692, p = 0.008).

A cross-sectional design cannot determine causal inferences and generalization (Levin, 2006). The study only used a year to examine the hypothesis of a negative correlation between ML risks and democratic governance, thus making generalization difficult.

Extant literature examined ML, terrorism and AML diversely. There was a need to estimate the association between ML risks and democratic governance, especially globally, during a global crisis like COVID-19, when democratic principles, such as the rule of law, transparency and accountability, are challenged. Many personnel were laid off, thus limiting supervision for ML and TF. This study presents evidence of this association.

This paper aims to explore how accounting is fostering neoliberal citizenship through the participants of Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). More specifically, this paper aims to understand how accounting discourse and the management accounting technique of budgeting, when intertwined with automated administrative processes of the NDIS, are giving rise to a pastoral form of power that directs people’s behaviour toward certain ends.

Publicly available data has been crafted into an autoethnographic case study of one fictitious person’s experiences with the NDIS – Mina. Mina is an amalgam created from material submitted to the Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on the NDIS. Mina’s experiences are then analysed through the lens of Foucault’s concept of pastoral power to explore how accounting has contributed to marketising and digitising public disability services.

Accounting rhetoric appears to be a central part of rationalising the decision to shift to individualised disability funding. Those receiving payments are treated as self-governable, financially responsible subjects and are therefore expected to have knowledge of management accounting techniques and budgeting. However, NDIS’s strong reliance on the accounting concepts of funds, budgets, cost and price is limiting people’s autonomy and subjecting them to intervention and control.

This paper addresses calls to explore the interplay between accounting and current disability policies. The analysis shows that incorporating accounting into the NDIS’s algorithms serves to conceal the underlying ideology of the programs, subtly driving behaviours towards neoliberal objectives. Further, this research extends the Foucauldian accounting literature by revealing the contribution of accounting to reinforcing the authority of digital pastors in contemporary times.

The Covid-19 pandemic appears to have engendered heterogeneous effects on individuals’ labour market prospects. This paper focuses on two possible sources of a heterogeneous exposition to labour market risks associated with the pandemic outbreak: the routine task content of the job and the teleworkability. To evaluate whether these dimensions played a crucial role in amplifying employment and wage gaps among workers, we focus on the case of Italy, the first EU country hit by Covid-19.

Investigating the actual effect of the pandemic on workers employed in jobs with a different degree of teleworkability and routinization, using real microdata, is currently unfeasible. This is because longitudinal datasets collecting annual earnings and the detailed information about occupations needed to capture a job’s routine task content and teleworkability are not presently available. To simulate changes in the wage distribution for the year 2020, we have employed a static microsimulation model. This model is built on data from the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (IT-SILC) survey, which has been enriched with administrative data and aligned with monthly observed labour market dynamics by industries and regions.

We measure the degree of job teleworkability and routinization with the teleworkability index (TWA) built by Sostero et al. (2020) and the routine-task-intensity index (RTI) developed by Cirillo et al. (2021), respectively. We find that RTI and TWA are negatively and positively associated with wages, respectively, and they are correlated with higher (respectively lower) risks of a large labour income drop due to the pandemic. Our evidence suggests that labour market risks related to the pandemic – and the associated new types of earnings inequality that may derive – are shaped by various factors (including TWA and RTI) instead of by a single dimension. However, differences in income drop risks for workers in jobs with varying degrees of teleworkability and routinization largely reduce when income support measures are considered, thus suggesting that the redistributive effect of the emergency measures implemented by the Italian government was rather effective.

No studies have so far investigated the effect of the pandemic on workers employed in jobs with a different degree of routinization and teleworkability in Italy. We thus investigate whether income drop risks in Italy in 2020 – before and after income support measures – differed among workers whose jobs are characterized by a different degree of RTI and TWA.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how gamification in advertising affects the effectiveness of advertising on social media.

Drawing from the gamification literature, immersion, achievement and social interaction features were identified as features, and advertising effectiveness factors were brand attention, brand liking and recall. A questionnaire was used for collecting data, and a structural equation modeling approach was applied to examine the model.

The results indicated that immersion, achievement and social interaction features affect advertising effectiveness. Furthermore, advertising effectiveness factors had a significant effect on purchase intentions.

The study contributes to the combination of gamification in advertising by offering characteristics for gamification that can enhance advertising effectiveness through brand attention, liking and recall. Finally, it provides managerial guidance on how they can use gamification in their advertising process.