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Individuals with fewer resources often receive more punitive treatment in the justice system than those who are more privileged. This situation is frequently justified with reference to societal preferences. To test the accuracy of this justification, the purpose of this study is to report on the extent to which the different treatments of tax evaders and welfare fraudsters in the Australian and New Zealand justice systems reflect the views of these societies.

Attitudes are captured in a survey with 3,000 respondents in Australia and New Zealand.

When asked directly, the majority of respondents (58 per cent) perceive no difference in people committing welfare fraud or tax evasion. However, responses to presented scenarios on tax evasion and welfare fraud show different tolerances for each crime. When provided with scenarios including crimes and criminals, results show that survey respondents see tax evasion as a less serious crime. However, when asked about their own propensity to commit the same offence, respondents indicate that they are more likely to engage in welfare fraud than tax evasion. The authors also report on factors that have an impact on individual’s attitudes towards tax evasion and welfare fraud.

The survey results do not clearly show more punitive attitudes towards tax evasion or welfare fraud. Thus, the authors do not find support for the suggestion that the harsher treatment of welfare fraud can be justified with reference to society’s views.

The study reports on original survey research.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight, challenge and explain the inequitable treatment of tax and welfare fraudsters in the criminal justice systems of Australia and New Zealand. The authors offer prejudice by way of explanation and suggest that it is also prejudice that restricts the implementation of more equitable processes. A second objective of the study is to highlight the importance of critical tax research as an instrument to agitate for social change.

A survey captures 3,000 respondents’ perceptions of the likelihood that different “types” of people will commit welfare or tax fraud. Using social dominance theory, the authors investigate the extent to which prejudice impacts on attitudes towards those engaged in these fraudulent activities.

The authors find the presence of traditional stereotypes, such as the perception that businessmen are more likely to commit tax fraud and people receiving welfare assistance are more likely to commit fraud. The authors also find strong preferences towards respondents’ own in-group, whereby businessmen, Maori and people receiving welfare assistance believed that their own group was less likely to commit either crime.

Where in-group preference exists among those who construct and enforce the rules relating to investigations, prosecutions and sentencing of tax and welfare fraud, it is perhaps unsurprising that welfare recipients attract less societal support than other groups who have support from their own in-groups that have greater power, resources and influence.

The study highlights the difficulty of social change in the presence of strong in-group preference and prejudice. Cognisance of in-group preference is relevant to the accounting profession where elements of self-regulation remain. In-group preferences may impact on services provided, as well as professional development and education.

The paper aims to examine the disclosure practices of KiwiSaver retail schemes in New Zealand. The aim is to investigate the level of comparability of KiwiSaver disclosures in the annual reports provided to members.

Using data from KiwiSaver annual reports, the paper addresses three research questions using a disclosure index method. First, in the absence of standardised performance measures, will schemes adopt comparable disclosure practices? Second, will larger schemes disclose more information than smaller schemes? Third, will better performing schemes disclose more information than poorer performing schemes?

The analysis indicates that KiwiSaver schemes' disclosure practices are not comparable and there are no evident patterns between size or performance and disclosure quality or quantity.

As this is an exploratory study, a sample of schemes is used in the research, thereby limiting generalisability of the research. In addition, different schemes have chosen different permitted forms for reporting to scheme members, exacerbating the lack of comparability this paper seeks to study; with some schemes providing abridged annual reports and others providing full annual reports to members. Moreover, the use of a disclosure index for classification introduces an element of subjectivity into the research method.

Overall savings, of which retirement savings is a subset, are low in New Zealand. One of the mechanisms to encourage saving is to provide an environment that supports effective investment decision making. This research highlights some of the inconsistencies that exist in current reporting practices and limit comparability between KiwiSaver schemes.

The purpose of this research is to explore the economic and social arguments used in support of government assistance for cultural well‐being, and the accounting measures used to capture cultural well‐being at a regional level in New Zealand.

Accounting information reported in city council annual reports is used to examine expenditure on cultural well‐being. The research investigates possible relationships between regional economic growth and regional expenditure on arts, culture and heritage. It also investigates justifications for expenditure on activities classified under the category of arts, culture and heritage in the annual reports produced by New Zealand city councils.

In most regions, funding for cultural activities has increased over the past ten years. The findings of this research indicate there is no significant relationship between funding on cultural activities and regional economic growth. Instead, the research highlights the emphasis placed on social benefit arising from funding cultural activities.

The research is limited by access to comparable data. Accordingly, not all New Zealand regions are included in the analysis, resulting in a small number of observations. Moreover, robust city‐based measures of economic growth are unavailable, resulting in the use of labour force participation as a proxy for economic growth, together with the elimination of some regions in part of the analysis.

Extant literature indicates that government expenditure on artistic and cultural activities is undertaken for reasons that include: possible economic benefit or generation of externalities, mitigation of market failure, educational purposes or improved national identity. In New Zealand, the “merit good” argument prevails with the objective of spending on artistic and cultural activity by local government expected to generate social rather than economic benefit.

This research aims to measure compliance in a tax experiment among students. The aim of the study is to investigate relationships between claimed behaviour in a questionnaire and actual behaviour in an experimental environment, together with different behaviours between males and females, and different age cohorts.

A total of 630 undergraduate Commerce students at a New Zealand university completed a questionnaire on attitudes towards the tax system. The students subsequently participated in a simulation experiment requiring responses to hypothetical tax evasion decisions. Individual reward payments were contingent on the outcome of these tax evasion decisions. Questionnaire responses, which captured intended behaviour, were compared with actual behaviour in the experiment.

The study finds more compliant behaviour among older students and students who have been at university longer. It also finds female students demonstrate more ethical responses in their behaviour than male students. In contrast to extant literature, it finds a positive relationship between students indicating a preference for compliant behaviour in the questionnaire, and behaviour in the experiment. This leads support for the use of Defining Issues Tests (or similar instruments that capture moral development intentions) in ethics education research, and challenges recent studies that find a gap between intended and actual behaviour.

As with all experimental research, the design is necessarily an artificial representation of the real world. Thus, the ability to generalise from this research is restricted.

Much of the research into the influence of ethics education on accounting students focuses on student claims of how they would respond in a hypothetical situation as measured by a Defining Issues Test or similar instrument, in order to provide a measure of ethical development. In contrast, this study adopts a behavioural approach. The findings indicate that Defining Issues Tests are likely to be an appropriate tool for ethics education research.

This literature review aims to portray the thematic landscape of the Pacific Accounting Review (PAR) from 2013 to 2023. This paper also synthesises the special issues in PAR and identifies the main research streams that facilitate contemplating the dialogic interactions between PAR and real-world challenges. Furthermore, this paper aligns these streams with the emerging concerns in Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and technological disruptions to propose impactful future directions for publications in PAR.

This review adopts bibliometric analysis to establish the main research streams and objective measures for directing future publications. This paper acquires the data of 310 PAR articles from the Web of Science and ensure the data integrity before the analysis. Based on this technique, this paper also analyses PAR’s productivity, authorship and local and global impacts.

Our bibliometric analysis reveals three key research streams: (1) ESG practices and disclosures, (2) informal institutions in accounting and (3) accounting in transition. This finding affirms PAR’s relevance to real-world accounting challenges. Using a thematic map, this paper portrays the current state of PAR’s topics to identify potential directions for future publications. Further, this paper proposes three future paths for PAR: (1) the research agenda for non-financial reporting, (2) research relating to and from diverse countries considering both formal and informal contemporary contextual factors and (3) the future of the evolving accounting profession.

This study adds value to the existing PAR reviews by extending our knowledge with the latest publications, demonstrating an objective and replicable approach, and offering future directions for PAR publications.

This paper aims to determine if the digital humanities technique of topic modeling would reveal interesting patterns in a corpus of library-themed literature focused on the future of libraries and pioneer a collaboration model in librarian-led digital humanities projects. By developing the project, librarians learned how to better support digital humanities by actually doing digital humanities, as well as gaining insight on the variety of approaches taken by researchers and commenters to the idea of the future of libraries.

The researchers collected a corpus of over 150 texts (articles, blog posts, book chapters, websites, etc.) that all addressed the future of the library. They ran several instances of latent Dirichlet allocation style topic modeling on the corpus using the programming language R. Once they produced a run in which the topics were cohesive and discrete, they produced word-clouds of the words associated with each topic, visualized topics through time and examined in detail the top five documents associated with each topic.

The research project provided an effective way for librarians to gain practical experience in digital humanities and develop a greater understanding of collaborative workflows in digital humanities. By examining a corpus of library-themed literature, the researchers gained new insight into how the profession grapples with the idea of the future and an appreciation for topic modeling as a form of literature review.

Topic modeling a future-themed corpus of library literature is a unique research project and provides a way to support collaboration between library faculty and researchers from outside the library.