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The purpose of this study was to investigate a framework for the implementation of freedom of information (FOI) legislation in South Africa, against Article 19’s nine principles of FOI legislation.

This qualitative study used semi-structured interviews to collect data from six experts selected by means of the snowball sampling technique and content analysis. The study used a modified Delphi design consisting of two rounds of interviews.

The results showed that little effort is made by government officials to demonstrate commitment to the implementation of FOI legislation.

The passing of FOI is expected to reduce corruption, increase public participation, reduce the level of secrecy and increase transparency and openness. This is not the case as the implementation of this socioeconomic right in South Africa is faced by numerous challenges, such as a lack of political will, secrecy laws providing for the opposite of what the FOI legislation seeks to achieve, poor legislative interpretation and a lack of clear policies. The study proposes a framework aimed at addressing these challenges.

The study provides a framework for the implementation of FOI legislation. The framework was developed under the guidance of Article 19 principles of freedom of information legislation.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how the Wirecard scandal has highlighted the need for further reforms in Germany and Europe, exposing institutional and market oversight weaknesses, particularly in terms of market integrity and investor protection.

To provide a comprehensive picture of the situation, this paper is based only on relevant studies, which focus on the topic of interest, namely, the context of the Wirecard collapse in June 2020. It also examines how internal and external governance and monitoring mechanisms failed to uncover major fraud within the German payments group earlier.

This study shows that this is by no means an isolated or unpredictable incident, and the allegations of accounting fraud had been known for several years, thanks to warnings from the Financial Times. In addition, the paper reviews the serious shortcomings revealed in the Wambach report. The report provided private details of the Wirecard audit and documents on the relationship between Wirecard management and the auditor. All of this can serve as a reference point for institutional and market oversight architecture in Germany and Europe and pave the way for future research.

The paper contributes to the literature by highlighting the implications of the Wirecard scandal and the lessons that can be learned from what was one of Germany’s biggest corporate scandals especially at a time when many are already affected by the impact of COVID-19 on the entire financial services industry.

This qualitative study set within Northern Ireland aims to explore professional perspectives on the application of evidence-informed practice to the adult safeguarding threshold screening process.

Data was gathered from seven social workers in one health and social care trust area, who perform the designated adult protection role, through individual semi-structured interviews in one region of Northern Ireland. The interview schedule comprised of a series of questions examining the role of the designated adult protection officer and included three vignettes (Appendix). A thematic analysis was undertaken using NVIVO software.

This paper reports main findings under the themes of: the role of the designated adult protection officer, threshold decision-making, evidence-informed practice and service improvement. One of the main findings was that professionals viewed the current process as too bureaucratic, and there was a desire to engage in more preventive safeguarding in collaboration with service users. There was a need to promote awareness of evidence-informed practice as it applies to the threshold screening process. Furthermore, the study raised the question of the need to consider the application of models or methods of assessment to the threshold screening process.

This in-depth exploration of the role of designated adult protection officers in Northern Ireland provides a valuable insight into the complexity involved in managing adult safeguarding referrals and investigations. This study adds to the existing knowledge base, identifies potential service improvements and highlights the gap in evidence-based practice as it applies to the threshold screening process. Threshold screening of adult safeguarding referrals remains a subjective process and is open to interpretation and differences in professional judgement. The study highlights the need to consider the application of quality improvement methodology to the threshold screening assessment and the need to promote the exchange of safeguarding knowledge.

Undertaking the theoretical lens of “The need to belong” theory, the present study intends to explore the aftermath of internal whistleblowing and the behavioral outcomes that follow by linking it to the literature on workplace ostracism, loneliness and intentions to quit.

The respondents were hotel employees in the Delhi NCR region of northern India. A hypothesized sequential mediation model was tested on a sample of employees from a hotel using a three-wave time-lagged multistudy design.

The findings of the study established that internal whistleblowing leads to intentions to quit via workplace ostracism and loneliness at work.

The unique contribution of this study lies in understanding the underlying mechanisms and discussing the behavioral outcomes that follow post-whistleblowing. HR managers need to develop a work environment that protects whistleblowers and has a zero-tolerance policy against employees engaging in any form of retaliation or unethical business practices. Managers must be more proactive and sensitive to the social cues that will make them aware of the presence of acts of ostracism. Upon encountering such acts, managers can consider counseling employees engaging in such unhealthy practices.

This study aims to build on the well-documented case of the Olympus scandal to dissect how social networks and corporate culture enabled corporate elites to commit fraud across multiple generations of leaders.

A flexible pattern matching approach was used to identify matches and mismatches between behavioural theory in corporate governance and the patterns observed in data from diverse sources.

The study applies the behavioural theory of corporate governance from different perspectives. Social networks and relationships were essential for the execution of the fraud and keeping it secret. The group of corporate elites actively created opportunities for committing misappropriation. This research presents individuals committing embezzlement because the opportunity already exists, and they can enrich themselves. The group of insiders who committed the fraud elaborated the rationalizations to others and asked outside associates to help rationalise the activities, while usually individuals provide rationalizations to themselves only.

The social processes among actors described in this case can inform the design of mechanisms to detect these behaviours in similar contexts.

This study provides both perspectives on the fraud scandal: the one of the whistle-blowers, and the opposing side of the transgressors and their associates. The extant case studies on Olympus presented the timeframe of the scandal right after the exposure. The current study dissects the events during the fraud execution and presents the case in a neutral or a negative light.

Stockbrokers’ frauds in India frequently occur, causing investors significant financial loss. This study aims to unfold the various dubious practices adopted by stock brokers in the recent past to defraud investors and the necessary corrective regulations passed by the market regulator to prevent and detect fraud.

The authors conduct exploratory research using a collective model of literature review, case studies and regulatory changes.

The authors find tightening the system’s loopholes and strengthening the regulatory system using technology helps in the early detection and prevention of fraud. Media activism and investors’ awareness play a role in reducing incidences of fraud.

This study unfolds the practices followed by stock brokers to defraud investors, indicative of regulatory gaps and enforcement lapses. Regulators are evolving a robust system to curb these practices and make them on par with international standards. But, it has a long way to go.

Robust fraud detection and prevention mechanism is desirable to restore investors’ confidence in the stock market. Regulators should focus on investors’ protection and education and whistleblowers’ protection. Compared to the market regulators worldwide, the Securities and Exchange Board of India has less power to identify, detect and punish fraudulent brokers and needs to be empowered.

Besides the regulatory changes, strict enforcement and investor campaigns are required to increase public awareness and restore trust in the stock market to combat the recurrence of fraud.

This paper can be helpful to regulators, investors and financial intermediaries like stock brokers and aid in strengthening the reliability of capital markets and restoring investors’ confidence.

The purpose of this research is to reveal the impact of public legal protection on the efficiency of internal corporate governance in banks. In addition, this research proposes a new corporate governance index that could be employed by the banking sector to evaluate the performance of their internal corporate governance mechanisms.

Orbis database, annual reports and direct questionnaire are used to collect corporate governance data of 127 banks from 14 countries during 2020. The Mann–Whitney U-test is employed to compare the efficiency of corporate governance mechanisms based on three subsamples of countries having different legal protection levels (weak, middle and strong).

This research suggests a new corporate governance index for banks based on seven constructs and 62 variables. This new non-parametric index could be used by bankers to improve the monitoring process and enhance the overall performance of banking. The results of this research show that the existence of a strong public legal protection environment within a specific country enhances the efficiency of corporate governance mechanisms in the banking sector and thus, leads to improve the protection of shareholders, depositors and other relevant stakeholders. However, in countries that are characterized by weak legal protection level, the efficiency of corporate governance mechanisms is very low and there are possibilities of entrenchment, expropriation and extraction of private benefits. These findings could be interpreted within the prediction of agency, moral hazard, asymmetric information, political and entrenchment theories.

This research paper provides information that bankers and other relevant stakeholders in the banking sector working in MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) and European countries. A strong public legal protection level could improve the efficiency of internal corporate governance mechanisms within banks.

This study aims to provide the main contents of the revision of the 2023 OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and suggest implications for the Korean government and multinational enterprises.

Following the brief history of the revision of OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, this study reviews and evaluates major substantive and procedural revisions of the 2023 OECD Guidelines, and then suggests countermeasures for Korean government and businesses.

The most significant substantive change of the 2023 revision is that expectations for environmental due diligence and disclosure obligations, including climate change and biodiversity, for multinational enterprises have been expanded and strengthened. Regarding procedural changes, the biggest change is the introduction of a basis rule for the National Contact Points for Responsible Business Conduct (NCPs for RBC) to judge each issue and a rule that the final statement must include follow-up details and deadlines, which is expected to strengthen the effectiveness of the NCP dispute resolution mechanism.

This study is the first academic paper to introduce major substantive and procedural revisions to the 2023 OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises in Korea. This study also provides implications for the Korean government and companies following the 2023 revised OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises as follows. First, the Korean government must establish a public–private partnership to closely communicate to prevent Korean companies from being harmed by failing to meet strengthening international Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) standards. In addition, Korean government should actively participate in ESG-related international forums, including the OECD, and strive to reflect the needs and interests of Korean companies. Second, the Korean NCP should strengthen its activities to prevent potential damage by expanding education and promotions for Korean businesses on related overseas legislative trends and NCP dispute case studies so that Korean companies can effectively deal with the strengthened ESG standards. Third, Korean multinational enterprises should preemptively establish an advanced ESG management system to seize new opportunities in the global supply chain previously concentrated in China and India in the process of reorganizing global supply chains according to the trend of strengthening ESG standards and the US value alliance strategy.

This study aims to analyze government hotline text data and generating forecasts could enable the effective detection of public demands and help government departments explore, mitigate and resolve social problems.

In this study, social problems were determined and analyzed by using the time attributes of government hotline data. Social public events with periodicity were quantitatively analyzed via the Prophet model. The Prophet model is decided after running a comparison study with other widely applied time series models. The validation of modeling and forecast was conducted for social events such as travel and educational services, human resources and public health.

The results show that the Prophet algorithm could generate relatively the best performance. Besides, the four types of social events showed obvious trends with periodicities and holidays and have strong interpretable results.

The research could help government departments pay attention to time dependency and periodicity features of the hotline data and be aware of early warnings of social events following periodicity and holidays, enabling them to rationally allocate resources to handle upcoming social events and problems and better promoting the role of the big data structure of government hotline data sets in urban governance innovations.

This study aims to investigate stakeholders' perception of the most prevalent unethical practices in the Ghanaian construction industry.

Data used for this study came from a cross-sectional survey (questionnaire), which was administered to 273 stakeholders in the construction industry using convenience sampling technique. The data were analyzed using statistical software package SPSSv17 to determine the most prevalent unethical practices. The ranking factor was calculated based on relative importance index (RII) value.

The results of this study reveal that corruption was perceived by major stakeholders as the most prevalent unethical behavior (RII = 0.82) followed by bribery (RII = 0.79). Political interference and kickback came third (RII = 0.77) and fourth (RII = 0.74), respectively. However, the least prevalent unethical behaviors were extortion (RII = 0.56), workplace violence (RII = 0.57), alcohol abuse (RII = 0.59) and harassment (RII = 0.59). The findings suggest that when the various groupings were taken into consideration separately, the differences in their perceptions were obvious.

Data for this study were collected from construction stakeholders in Ghana who were conveniently sampled. As a result, in reference to the sampling framework which focused on major stakeholders in only two regions of Ghana does not sufficiently ensure full generalization of the results.

The findings of the study provide significant information for construction organizations and practitioners regarding unethical practices, which are most prevalent in the Ghanaian construction industry. Construction organizations and practitioners seeking to mitigate the negative effect of unethical practices on their performance should focus on educating construction workers on how to avoid corrupt practices and report same to the authorities. Also, ethics training programs must be instituted for staff coupled with constant and random inspection and checking of ethical compliance, verbal promotion and praise for ethical conduct and in some cases increase in employees pay.

This paper is one of the first to have accessed the views of broader stakeholders, i.e. consultants, contractors, professionals, suppliers, regulators, clients and construction workers in the construction industry regarding the most prevalent unethical practices in the Ghanaian construction industry in one study. This study, therefore, enriches the current literature by providing additional dimension to the understanding of unethical practices in the Ghanaian construction industry.