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This study’s main objective is to explore the ISO 9001 implementation model and identify a future research agenda. This is important because not all organizations find it easy to implement ISO 9001, and not all organizations get positive benefits after implementing it.

The paper presents a comprehensive review of the literature on ISO 9001 implementation models using the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews (PRISMA) methodology to systematically review the existing literature on ISO 9001 implementation models. Relevant studies published from 2003 to early 2023 are explored to reveal the research landscape, gaps and trends.

Many ISO 9001 implementation methods have been developed for actual implementation in organizations, including models, frameworks, special variable considerations, application uses and integration. These methods were developed and applied to cover gaps regarding constraints, unbeneficial, special conditions, implementation objectives and organization types in ISO 9001 implementation. Current issues and future research on ISO 9001 implementation models were found, namely ISO 9001 implementation models specific to SMEs, ISO 9001 implementation levels, ISO 9001 implementation models that are agile to change, and affordable certification models.

Only a few researchers have systematically reviewed the literature or taken a bibliometric approach in their analyses to provide an overview of the current trends and links to ISO 9001 implementation models. The ISO 9001 standard is a general standard and can be applied by all organizations with the implementation method left to the implementer. Many implementation methods have been developed, but several implementation obstacles and disadvantages are still found. It is important to know the extent of current research and discover future research gaps regarding methods of implementing the ISO 9001 standard.

The current study uses an advanced machine learning method and aims to investigate whether auditors perceive financial statements that are principles-based as less risky. More specifically, this study aims to explore the association between principles-based accounting standards and audit pricing and between principles-based accounting standards and the likelihood of receiving a going concern opinion.

The study uses an advanced machine-learning method to understand the role of principles-based accounting standards in predicting audit fees and going concern opinion. The study also uses multiple regression models defining audit fees and the probability of receiving going concern opinion. The analyses are complemented by additional tests such as economic significance, firm fixed effects, propensity score matching, entropy balancing, change analysis, yearly regression results and controlling for managerial risk-taking incentives and governance variables.

The paper provides empirical evidence that auditors charge less audit fees to clients whose financial statements are more principles-based. The finding suggests that auditors perceive financial statements that are principles-based less risky. The study also provides evidence that the probability of receiving a going-concern opinion reduces as firms rely more on principles-based standards. The finding further suggests that auditors discount the financial numbers supplied by the managers using rules-based standards. The study also reveals that the degree of reliance by a US firm on principles-based accounting standards has a negative impact on accounting conservatism, the risk of financial statement misstatement, accruals and the difficulty in predicting future earnings. This suggests potential mechanisms through which principles-based accounting standards influence auditors’ risk assessments.

The authors recognize the limitation of this study regarding the sample period. Prior studies compare rules vs principles-based standards by focusing on the differences between US generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and international financial reporting standards (IFRS) or pre- and post-IFRS adoption, which raises questions about differences in cross-country settings and institutional environment and other confounding factors such as transition costs. This study addresses these issues by comparing rules vs principles-based standards within the US GAAP setting. However, this limits the sample period to the year 2006 because the measure of the relative extent to which a US firm is reliant upon principles-based standards is available until 2006.

The study has major public policy suggestions as it responds to the call by Jay Clayton and Mary Jo White, the former Chairs of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), to pursue high-quality, globally accepted accounting standards to ensure that investors continue to receive clear and reliable financial information globally. The study also recognizes the notable public policy implications, particularly in light of the current Chair of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) Andreas Barckow’s recent public statement, which emphasizes the importance of principles-based standards and their ability to address sustainability concerns, including emerging risks such as climate change.

The study has major public policy suggestions because it demonstrates the value of principles-based standards. The study responds to the call by Jay Clayton and Mary Jo White, the former Chairs of the US SEC, to pursue high-quality, globally accepted accounting standards to ensure that investors continue to receive clear and reliable financial information as business transactions and investor needs continue to evolve globally. The study also recognizes the notable public policy implications, particularly in light of the current Chair of the IASB Andreas Barckow’s recent public statement, which emphasizes the importance of principles-based standards and their ability to address sustainability concerns, including emerging risks like climate change. The study fills the gap in the literature that auditors perceive principles-based financial statements as less risky and further expands the literature by providing empirical evidence that the likelihood of receiving a going concern opinion is increasing in the degree of rules-based standards.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to knowledge about the diversity of credibility arrangements in new audit spaces “in the margins” of auditing and the implications of such arrangements.

The paper is based on an in-depth qualitative study of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) rights certification run by the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Rights (RFSL) during its first decade of operation. We have interviewed employees and studied documents at the certification units within the RFSL. We have also interviewed certified organizations.

We highlight two features that explain the unusual credibility arrangements in this audit practice: the role of beneficiaries in the organizational arrangements chosen and the role of responsibility as an organizing value with consequences for responsibility allocation in this certification. These features make it possible for the RFSL to act as a credible auditor even though it deviates from common arrangements for credible audits.

The RFSL certification is different in several ways. First, the RFSL acts as both a trainer and an auditor. Second, the trainers/auditors at the RFSL have no accreditation to guarantee their credibility. Third, the RFSL decides for itself what standards should apply for the certification and adapts these standards to the operation being audited. Therefore, this case provides a good opportunity to study alternative credibility arrangements in the margins of auditing as well as their justifications.

This paper aims to assess the factors that may explain the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) convergence, considering Hofstede’s cultural dimensions as the theoretical reference for the cultural approach proposed. Additional factors include countries’ contextual and macroeconomic characteristics.

Logistic and probit regression models were used to identify the factors that may explain the IPSAS (fully or adapted) use by countries, including 166 countries in this assessment (59 for those whose cultural dimensions are available).

The findings consistently indicate collectivism and indebtedness levels as explanatory factors, providing insights into cultural dimensions along with macroeconomic characteristics as a relevant factor of countries’ convergence to IPSAS.

There are different levels of IPSAS convergence by countries that were not considered. This aspect may hide different countries’ characteristics that may explain those options, which could not be distinguished in this paper.

As a result of this paper, the International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board may gain insights that can be applied within the IPSAS due process to overcome the main challenges when collaborating with national authorities to achieve a high level of convergence. This analysis may include how to accommodate countries’ cultural differences as well as their contextual and macroeconomic characteristics.

There is a trend of moving toward accrual-based accounting standards by countries. Because the public sector embraces a new culture following the IPSAS path, it is relevant to assess if there are cultural factors, besides contextual and macroeconomic characteristics, that may explain the countries’ convergence to those standards.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first cross-country analysis on the likely influence of cultural dimensions on IPSAS convergence as far as the authors’ knowledge.

Develop a comprehensive framework for assessing the knowledge organization systems (KOSs), including the taxonomy of Wikipedia and the ontologies of Wikidata, with a specific focus on enhancing management and retrieval with a gender nonbinary perspective.

This study employs heuristic and inspection methods to assess Wikipedia’s KOS, ensuring compliance with international standards. It evaluates the efficiency of retrieving non-masculine gender-related articles using the Catalan Wikipedian category scheme, identifying limitations. Additionally, a novel assessment of Wikidata ontologies examines their structure and coverage of gender-related properties, comparing them to Wikipedia’s taxonomy for advantages and enhancements.

This study evaluates Wikipedia’s taxonomy and Wikidata’s ontologies, establishing evaluation criteria for gender-based categorization and exploring their structural effectiveness. The evaluation process suggests that Wikidata ontologies may offer a viable solution to address Wikipedia’s categorization challenges.

The assessment of Wikipedia categories (taxonomy) based on KOS standards leads to the conclusion that there is ample room for improvement, not only in matters concerning gender identity but also in the overall KOS to enhance search and retrieval for users. These findings bear relevance for the design of tools to support information retrieval on knowledge-rich websites, as they assist users in exploring topics and concepts.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gained great attention among regulators, stock market authorities, and firms' stakeholders for many decades. In this chapter, we first review the main regulations, standards, and laws issued by UAE federal authorities namely the Company Commercial Law of 2015, the Abu Dhabi Stock Exchange (ADX) disclosure guidance of 2019, Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week, and UAE CSR platform. Second, we present a summary of the empirical research on CSR issues in UAE context, namely in the following four fields: (1) CSR determinants both at the micro and macro levels, (2) CSR measures in the three pillars (environmental, social, and governance), (3) the impact of CSR policy and practices on financial performance/market value, (4) and the role of some mediating/moderating variables such as leadership and board gender diversity. Results show greater compliance to CSR standards among different industries and institutions but heterogenous empirical findings in the four explored fields. While there is crucial alignment with both social and environmental standards as evidenced by numerous empirical studies, additional efforts should be deployed to highlight the governance pillar through firms' discretionary reporting. Our survey provides useful directives and outcomes as it portrays both legal aspects coupled with some empirical evidence of CSR issues in the UAE context. Our study helps corporations to comply with local standards on sustainability reporting and highlights the potential economic benefits and advantages for firms adopting CSR strategy. Furthermore, it can be considered as the cornerstone for regulatory bodies in the United Arab Emirates when issuing/enhancing new standards/rules on CSR practices.

The current study aims to analyze the role of International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) in sustainability issues and its impact on the attitude of practitioners (auditors) in industrial companies. The current study relies on the analytical method, one of the tools of the inductive approach, by examining the literature of researchers, international and local organizations, publications, series, alerts, and topics dealt with by the IFAC, as well as reviewing studies, theoretical and applied research, periodicals, books, and statistics. And specialized publications for this subject, which is related to other sciences – such as – environmental science, economic, and political sciences. The study reached many results, the most important of which are: (1) The first half of the current decade has seen high interest from the IFAC, has led to the issuance of International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB) international standard on assurance engagements 3410, (GHG) Statements. (2) Sustainability has become important to a growing number of enterprises, and may have a significant influence, in certain cases, the financial statements, also became the sustainability of the topics under increasing attention from users of financial statements. Thus, the financial statements will need a practitioner to take into consideration sustainability issues and a private greenhouse gas when auditing the financial statements. This study is distinguished by analyzing the role of the IFAC and the IAASB for the period from 1998 to 2023 regarding sustainability issues.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the discussion surrounding the definition of accounting proposed by Carnegie et al. (2021a, 2021b) and further elaborated by Carnegie et al. (2023) from/under an institutionalist political-economy (IPE) based foundation and to specifically extend this approach to the arena of social and environmental accounting (SEA).

By adopting an IPE approach to SEA, this study offers a critique of the use of the notion of capital to refer to nature and people in SEA frameworks and standards.

A SEA framework based on the capabilities approach is proposed based on the concepts of human capabilities and global commons for the purpose of preserving the commons and enabling the flourishing of present and future generations.

The proposed framework allows the engagement of accounting community, in particular SEA researchers, with and contribution to such well-established initiatives as the Planetary Boundaries framework and the human development reports initiative of the United Nations Development Programme.

Based on the capability approach, this study applies Carnegie et al.’s (2023) framework to SEA. This new approach more attuned to the pursuit of sustainable human development and the sustainable development goals, may contribute to turning accounting into a major positive force through its impacts on the world, expressly upon organisations, people and nature.

This study examines how bilateral international trade among mandatory International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adopter countries moderates the relation between IFRS adoption and firms’ financial reporting quality.

The authors use data from 2007 to 2015 and focus on publicly listed firms from non-European Union countries that adopted IFRS on a mandatory basis.

The authors find that the interaction between mandatory IFRS adoption and a country’s bilateral trade with other countries using IFRS is negatively and significantly related to accruals-based earnings management, which is an inverse measure of financial reporting quality. This result is driven by firms in less developed countries. The improvement in accounting quality is for firms located in countries that both fully and partially adopt IFRS. The authors also find a significant and negative coefficient for the relation between real earnings management and the interaction between mandatory IFRS adoption and a country’s bilateral trade with other IFRS countries in the post-global financial crisis period.

Overall, the authors’ results are consistent with the notion that the mandatory adoption of IFRS creates a positive externality where firms improve their accounting quality because increased financial statement comparability means that foreign customers and suppliers can monitor the quality of earnings more easily.

This study aims to examine the correlation between the readability of financial statements and the likelihood of future stock price crashes in nonfinancial companies listed on the Egyptian Stock Exchange. It further explores the possible moderating effect of audit quality on this relationship.

The study uses ordinary least squares regression, generalized least squares estimation and two-stage least squares methodology to examine and validate the research hypotheses. The sample comprises 107 nonfinancial companies registered on the Egyptian Stock Exchange from 2016 to 2019.

The results reveal a significant negative association between the readability of financial statements and stock price crash risk. This suggests that companies with more complex financial statements tend to experience higher future crash risks. Additionally, the study identifies audit quality as a significant moderating factor. Higher audit quality, often indicated by engagements with Big-4 audit firms, strengthens the influence of financial statements readability on stock price crash risk. This implies that while high audit quality enhances investor confidence and market stability, it also accentuates the negative consequences of complex financial statements.

The findings of this paper have significant implications for regulators and standard-setting bodies in Egypt. They should consider refining and revising existing standards to emphasize the importance of enhancing the readability of financial reports. Additionally, auditing firms should actively engage in efforts to ensure clearer and more transparent financial reporting. These actions are vital for boosting investor confidence, strengthening Egypt’s capital market and mitigating potential risks associated with information opacity and complexity.

This study represents a pioneering endeavor within the Arab and Egyptian financial environments. To the best of the author’s knowledge, it is the first examination of the association between the readability of financial statements and stock price crash risk in these contexts. Furthermore, it explores factors such as audit quality that may influence this connection.