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The objective of this paper is to identify and provide a description, assessment, and analysis of frauds occurring in governmental entities at the federal, state, and local levels and to compare these findings to data from the private sector. Analyses are conducted along the following dimensions: the victim of the fraud, its perpetrator(s), the fraud scheme, and the detection and investigation of the fraudulent activity. In addition, the conditions under which the frauds occurred in both the public and private sectors are described, discussed, and analyzed. Data were obtained from a mail survey distributed to the membership of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. A total of 2,471 responses containing details of actual fraud cases were received. Of these, 611 cases described frauds that had occurred in governmental units and 1,860 depicted frauds that had occurred in the private sector. The findings of this study clearly indicate that no entity is immune to victimization by criminal activities of a financial nature.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

This paper seeks to investigate the relationships between organizational‐professional conflict (OPC), organizational commitment (OC), professional commitment (PC), job satisfaction (JS), and job resignation intention (JR) in the Jordanian and Kuwaiti auditing firms. In addition, the paper examines the impacts of demographic and nationality variables on the previous variables.

Data were collected through a survey questionnaire for a sample of 308 auditors from Jordan and Kuwait.

The study finds that there is a significant impact of OC and PC on OPC and negative correlation between OC and PC. Additionally, the results show a negative correlation between OPC and JS and positive correlation between JS and OC. The nationality variable that dichotomizes Jordan and Kuwait sub samples has a significant effect on OPC and JR.

The sample is limited to auditing firms that have five or more auditors. Thus, the results are not generalizable to all audit firms working in these two countries.

OPC in large audit firms is more than that in small audit firms and the OC in large audit firms is less than that in small audit firms. This finding suggests that large auditing firms would do well when managing these factors.

Prior research is not extensive in this area, specifically that which compares the attitudes of the auditors in Jordan and Kuwait.

This research examines the effect of auditors’ personal debt on their audit decision making. We developed two different background scenarios that vary the level of the auditor’s personal debt. While one scenario indicated that the partner lived a modest lifestyle and was relatively free of debt, the other indicated that the partner lived an expensive lifestyle and had considerable personal debt. Our data indicate that auditors receiving the higher personal indebtedness scenario were more likely to believe that the auditor in the case study would sign-off on the audit without doing any additional work. We also found that the propensity to believe that the auditor in the case study would sign-off on the audit without doing any additional work decreased as the participants’ rank within the firm increased. Our research documents that a partner’s level of indebtedness could influence the participant’s audit decisions.