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The theory of economic regulation is used to ascertain how and why the failure of regulatory governance in New Zealand contributed to investor losses of $8.5bn following the collapse of more than 60 public finance companies since 2006.

Relevant documents in the public domain, including government documents, government agency reports, newspaper articles, business journals, academic journals and trade publications were examined to gather evidence for this study.

This study found that the regulatory and supervisory framework failed to provide the trustee companies with the necessary enforcement powers and/or responsibilities and ensure effective auditor performance.

The findings suggest that, segmenting the market with different regulations for each market segment may discourage competition and may protect private interests rather than the public interest. It was also found that the control mechanisms for monitoring auditor performance are detective rather than preventive in nature which means investor losses from poor auditor performance can only be mitigated and not prevented.

This study analyses the contributing factors to the investor losses.

Scotland's day of reputation in publishing came with the Foulises, who set a standard not only for Scotland but also for Europe. Robert Foulis, who was inspired by Dr. Francis Hutcheson to become bookseller and printer, opened his shop in Glasgow about 1741. He and his brother Andrew had visited the Continent on occasions, devoting themselves to studying the printing houses there. In a letter written by Thomas Innes of the Scots College of Paris, a well‐known Jacobite, to James Edgar, Secretary to the Chevalier de St. George at Rome, he tells about the departure of the brothers from Paris, and says that they returned home by London bringing with them six or seven hogsheads of books they had bought up in France. On their return to Glasgow, Robert opened out as a bookseller, his printers being Urie & Co., a firm some of whose issues are of higher quality than had to that date been achieved in Scotland. There was an obvious leaning to the classical side in the early Foulis publishing, and this inclination increased as the connexion with the University became cemented.

This paper aims to examine the historical evolution and popularity of activity-based thinking in management accounting. As an organising framework, this paper applies the lens of management fashion theory, which is a perspective that is well suited to the examination of the lifecycles of management accounting concepts and ideas.

This paper pursues a bibliographic approach to better understand the past and present state of activity-based thinking. Thus, this paper attempts to piece together a mosaic picture by synthesising existing research on activity-based thinking from a wide range of academic and practitioner-oriented sources.

While the original activity-based costing (ABC) model has evolved and broadened and has generated new related concepts, studies suggest that it is not as successful as accounting concepts such as the balanced scorecard. The overall popularity trajectory of activity-based thinking can be considered to be negative, and it is currently not receiving much attention in accounting journals.

This paper is based on desk research and is limited by a reliance on secondary sources. In addition, it may be subject to the authors’ own biases when it comes to defining relevant articles studied.

This paper provides more insight into the evolution and popularity of activity-based thinking and discusses some of the reasons why it is not more widely used in practice.

Although many studies have examined the diffusion of ABC-related techniques, most are quite dated. More than 30 years have passed since the coining of the ABC term, and the time is ripe to provide a historical re-examination of the impact of this type of thinking in the field of accounting and to consider the latest developments and trends.

The setting of private finance companies that failed in New Zealand during 2006-2012 was characterized by weaker corporate governance and enforcement of securities law. This paper aims to explore audit failure in this setting and examine whether auditors erred in their audits of the failed finance companies and whether the audit failure rate of Big N auditors was different from that of non-Big N auditors.

This paper adopts the archival research method and uses three sets of evidence to assess audit failure – the frequency of going concern opinion (GCO) prior to failure, misstatements in the last audited financial statements, and the violation of the Code of Ethics.

The study finds that only 41 per cent of the sample companies received the GCO in their last audit prior to failure and provides evidence of material misstatements in the financial statements of a number of failed finance companies that received clean audit opinions prior to failure and breaches of the Code of Ethics by a number of auditors. These results strongly indicate audit failure for a number of failed finance companies. The audit failure rate, however, appears less for Big N auditors than for non-Big N auditors.

The study draws attention of the stock market regulator and the accounting profession to an area, the audit of private finance companies, that needs better quality audits.

This paper provides systematic evidence of audit failure in failed finance companies in New Zealand. It also furnishes preliminary evidence of Big N auditors compensating for weaker corporate governance.

This article explores how homicide detectives make sense of and manipulate multiple physical, digital and informational artefacts when assembling case narratives. The authors introduce the concept of mosaicking to illuminate how different modes of information, deriving from different investigative methods, are used in concert at key moments of the investigative process – defining what type of crime has occurred; the incrimination and elimination of suspects; and decisions to charge key suspects.

The data qualitatively analysed include several hundred case papers, interview transcripts (n = 144) and detailed ethnographic fieldnotes relating to 44 homicide investigations across four police services. These were collected during a four-year ethnographic study of the use of forensic sciences and technologies (FSTs) in British homicide investigations.

Mosaicking describes how investigators blend and combine information, intelligence and evidence generated via different techniques and methods, to make sense of “who did what to whom and why?” Through processes of convergent and divergent mosaicking, detectives are able to “lean” on different kinds of material to reinforce or connect key points of evidence or intelligence.

The findings fill a gap in knowledge about how investigators blend and composite diverse sources of information in the construction of case narratives. The findings present a more complex and nuanced understanding of the epistemological and interpretative work conducted by contemporary detectives, given the array of investigative technologies they increasingly have at their disposal.

Mr. Robert F. Ashby's article in the Autumn number on the provision of fiction in libraries encourages us, as consumers who are not librarians, to make a suggestion about the criteria used in selecting from one kind of popular fiction, crime stories. The element of something more than a puzzle and a story has always intrigued us in these books, and our interest in them is now almost exclusively in their discussion of this other factor. So we read crime fiction at random, from the local library; and recently we took the first six thrillers which neither of us had read from the Latest Additions shelf so as deliberately to consider them from this point of view.

An external management audit is an independent examination of an organization resulting in a statement to external users on the performance of the management function. A simulated corporate overdraft decision was posted to 354 bankers with three groups of 118 bankers receiving the same package of information but with different audit reports namely a financial audit report only, a favourable management audit report and an adverse management audit report. The response rate was 58 per cent (205 respondents). Conclusion overall that the bankers′ overdraft decisions were statistically significantly related to the addition of an adverse management audit report. The reasons given by the bankers for their corporate overdraft decisions also suggest that bankers would be interested in and would use external management audit reports.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the processes involved in implementing a full costing method – the unité de valeur ajoutée (UVA) (added value unit) method – as well as to explore the uses made of it.

Firms that adopted the UVA method between 1995 and 2009 were studied by means of semi‐structured interviews with individuals concerned in the firm and with the external consultants. The interviews, which lasted two to three hours, were conducted both during the implementation process and several months later. Secondary data in the form of all the documentation regarding the initial setting up and updating of the method were also collected.

The main advantages of the UVA method are the fine breakdown of costs, facilitating decision making, and its modest use of resources. Generally, it was adopted by small firms with a “defensive” strategic behaviour. The success of its implementation was largely a result of the strong involvement of management. Nevertheless, it found limited use as a management tool compared to the activity based costing (ABC) method, owing to the small size of the firms that adopted the UVA method.

This research paper is the first to examine the various stages of setting up the UVA method of cost accounting method, by collecting data from users on two occasions, separated by an interval of eight years.

The purpose of this paper is to examine financial management in the Pre‐Reformation church in Aberdeen, Scotland during the bishopric of Bishop William Elphinstone (1488‐1514).

The paper employs a combination of literature‐based analysis, archival research and the use of biographies in order to examine aspects of financial management within the Pre‐Reformation church in Aberdeen, Scotland.

There is evidence that accounting for assets and income was mobilised in order to achieve social aims. Recording mechanisms give visibility to the church's remuneration and governance strategy. Together, these examples show that there was no evidence of a sacred/secular divide in this context.

Archives may be incomplete but can give insight into financial management in historical context and aspects of the sacred/secular divide.

This paper aids understanding of visibility and governance possibilities afforded by accounting that has been mobilised in an historic setting in order to achieve social aims.

In discussing the subject of bread, or indeed any subject, one is of course confronted by the initial difficulty of definition. Nothing is harder than to define any concrete thing, no matter how common and well‐known it may be. This is not surprising when we remember that no one has ever succeeded in defining a definition. Perhaps the best attempt to do so is Pascal's, in the “Port Royal Logic,” and it is easy to drive a coach and six through the rules which he lays down for definitions to conform to. The only things that can be strictly defined are mathematical abstractions, such as a circle, which are formed on natural objects by pruning away their multitudinous properties till only two or three which can be expressed by a short and indisputable definition are left.