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HIV/AIDS has implications of varying severity across a wide spectrum of businesses in South Africa. Financial accountability is therefore required to enable investors and other stakeholders to be advised regarding the effect of HIV/AIDS on company performance and to make informed decisions. This paper explores financial accountability with regard to HIV/AIDS. It investigates top management’s awareness, coping strategies and financial information (available and required) that is communicated internally and to stakeholders. Its empirical content concentrates on major public companies that operate in industries in which HIV/AIDS is known to be present. It reveals that companies are informed and pragmatic. However, many do not engage in legally permissible prevalence testing, and thereby frustrates attempts at a clear definition of the problem and at forecasting. Most companies are therefore unable to project what the effect of HIV/AIDS on future performance and profitability will be. The paper concludes that, although HIV/AIDS receives attention in terms of corporate governance, there is an absence of financial accountability via annual reports and financial statements. Many companies have no information available, while others may elect not to disclose it.

This paper aims to hypothesize on the relationship between the Millennial workforce and US firms’ response to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017. The authors postulate that societal pressure from the younger generational cohorts will motivate socially cognizant corporations to share their newly acquired tax benefits with their workforce to attract, retain and inspire employee productivity and retention, as well as customer loyalty.

The authors empirically examine work-related cultural attitudes of the Millennial generational cohort in the USA, and by exploring related literature on organizational management and supply side economics, the authors aim to connect them to firms’ response to tax cut windfall in a simple theoretical model. The authors complement their methods by using descriptive statistics on firm tax responses that followed the 2017 TCJA.

The authors offer support for the notion that companies are behaving rationally by providing short-term benefits to employees when employees are, on average, younger. The competitive nature of the global market acts as an incentive to avoid permanent obligations such as wage and benefits increases. The data reveal that a significant number of companies had a transitory reaction to the latest tax cut.

The authors encourage future research, once sufficient time elapses, to exploit the time periods before and after the tax cut to provide a better assessment of the empirical impact of the 2017 tax cut on firm responses, conditional on workforce makeup.

The authors examine whether and how the Millennial cohort might shape firm behavior following changes in tax policy.

The objective of this chapter is to compare the measurement bases of income and expenditures found in International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) used in Public Accounts with those in the statistical rules used in National Accounts/Government Finance Statistics (GFS). Both frameworks apply an accrual methodology, but, while some governments appear dubious about adopting the IPSAS framework, the National Accounts framework is more ‘tried and tested’ for government financial reporting on an international scale. The practical application of the accrual methodology in the two frameworks differs to a certain extent. These differences provide learning opportunities for both frameworks.

This paper aims to investigate the links between accounting values in Chinese listed companies’ balance sheets and the exposure of their fraudulent activities.

Every balance sheet account is proposed to be a potential vehicle to manipulate financial statements.

Other receivables, inventories, prepaid expenses, employee benefits payables and long-term payables are important indicators of fraudulent financial statements. These results confirm that asset account manipulation is frequently carried out and cast doubt on earlier conclusions by researchers that inflation of liabilities is the most common source of financial statement manipulation.

Previous practices of solely scaling balance sheet values by assets are revealed to produce spurious relationships, while scaling by both assets and sales effectively detects fraudulent financial statements and provides a useful fraud prediction tool for Chinese auditors, regulators and investors.

For professional service firms (PSFs) the partnership form of governance is the most effective means of reconciling the potentially competing claims of three sets of stakeholders: shareholders, professionals, and clients. Increasingly, PSFs are abandoning this traditional form of governance in favour of incorporation and flotation. Very little is known about the implications of this trend. We examine an alliance between a partnership and a corporation and analyse the systems and structures that professionals in both firms deploy in their efforts to preserve and sustain the interpretive scheme of professionalism and partnership. We emphasise the need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between governance as a legal form and governance as an interpretive scheme.

The purpose of this study is to examine how employees’ deference to leader authority may induce their unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) and whether this translation is more likely to materialize in the presence of two personal factors (dispositional greed and proactive personality) and two organizational factors (workplace status and job rotation).

The empirical assessment of the research hypotheses relies on quantitative survey data collected among 350 Canadian-based employees who work in the healthcare sector. The statistical analyses include hierarchical moderated regression.

The role of deference to leader authority in stimulating UPB is greater when employees (1) have a natural disposition to always want more, (2) enjoy initiative taking, (3) believe that they have a great deal of prestige in the organization and (4) operate in an organizational environment in which job rotation across different departments is encouraged.

The results inform managers about the risk that employees’ willingness to obey organizational authorities unconditionally might escalate into negative behaviors that can cause harm to both the organization and employees in the long run, as well as the personal and organizational circumstances in which this escalation is more likely to occur.

This study extends extant research by investigating the conditional effects of an unexplored determinant of UPB, namely, a personal desire to defer to organizational leaders.

Building on an integration of strategic human resource capital management and human capital disclosure literature streams, this paper explores the associations between human resource performance and human resource disclosure in the financial services sector.

Using content analysis and panel regression methods, the paper examines the extent, nature, and information content of human capital disclosures in the financial services sectors in North America during the global financial crisis period.

Labor costs and marginal labor productivity are significantly associated with human resource disclosure and the latter is significantly related to both financial (explicit) and non-financial (implicit or relational) components of the employment relationship. Results show inverted effects between the US and Canadian samples. The findings support a contingency view or “best-fit” approach to human resource capital management.

Differences in labor market structures and human capital attributes could have significant impacts on human capital disclosure strategies. More transparent and detailed disclosures regarding human resource capital management may provide useful and relevant information for investors and stakeholders in general.

The study provides insights into how labor market structures and human capital attributes jointly affect the extent and nature of corporate disclosures with regards to rents distribution and relational governance between employers and employees.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of audit committee (AC) characteristics (size, independence, the number of meetings and expertise) on compliance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) for related party disclosures (CRPD) in the South African context.

This paper is based on an analysis of the consolidated financial statements of 120 non-financial firms listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) for the period 2012 to 2014. Panel regressions have been used.

The findings of this paper reveal that CRPD is positively influenced by AC independence. However, AC size and the number of AC meetings do not affect CRPD. Regarding expertise, the authors find that there is a positive and significant relationship between CRPD and have combined industry expertise with accounting and financial expertise. However, while accounting expertise by itself is associated with CPRD, industry expertise by itself is not associated with CRPD.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no empirical studies that have addressed the effect of AC characteristics on compliance with IFRS for CRPD.

The Australian higher education sector faces severe risks from the consequences of COVID-19. This paper aims to explore these risks, their immediate impacts and the likely future impacts. The authors specifically focus on the institutional financial and social risks arising from the global pandemic.

The authors collect data using the 2019 annual reports of the 37 Australian public universities and relevant media contributions. The findings of identified sector change are interpreted through Laughlin’s organisational change diagnosis.

The sector confronts significant financial and social risks because of its over-reliance on income from fee-paying onshore overseas students resulting in universities primarily undertaking morphostatic changes. These risks include job losses, changing employment conditions, mental health issues for students, scholars, other staff, including casual staff, online learning shortfalls and the student expectations of their university experience. The study reveals how many of these risks are the inevitable consequence of the “accountingisation” of Australian public universities.

Despite material exposure, the universities provide only limited disclosure of the extent of the risks associated with increasing dependence on overseas student fees to 31 December 2019. The analysis highlights fake accountability and distorted transparency to users of audited financial statements – a major limitation of university annual reports.

Research on the Australian higher education sector has mainly focussed on the impact of policies and changes. The public disclosure of critical risks taken by these universities are now addressed.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether focus on social output affects the efficiency of MFIs. Inclusive growth is the key developmental aim for many developing countries, including India. The role of microfinance institutions (MFIs) in promoting financial inclusion is widely applauded. However, to achieve financial sustainability, MFIs have become highly commercialised and are seen to have drifted away from their social mission. Various studies have shown the efficiency of MFIs on financial parameters. MFIs being a social enterprise, it is important to include social output among the efficiency parameters.

This study attempts to compare the efficiency of MFIs with and without social performances across the various size of MFIs based on their asset, i.e. large, medium and small. This study uses Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) for assessing an MFI’s efficiency. For calculating the social output score, the Gutman Scale is used. Efficiency is calculated with and without social output, and the resulting scores are compared to assess the impact of social performance on the efficiency of MFIs.

The results of this study allow us to conclude that with the inclusion of social output, the efficiency of MFIs improves across various categories. In terms of social performances, it is concluded that MFIs are targeting women and mostly working in rural areas but have neglected issues like health and education.

The findings of this study will help MFIs in formulating their mission and vision statements and in achieving the objective of financial inclusion without experiencing mission drift.