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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the compliance of Saudi shareholding companies with the requirements of corporate governance issued by the Board of Capital Market Authority in the Kingdom and their impact on earnings management.

A questionnaire was used to collect data about the compliance of the Saudi shareholding companies with corporate governance requirements and discretionary accruals (DAs) were calculated from the financial statements of these companies using the modified Jones model, then multiple regression was used to test the relationship between the variables.

The results of the study revealed that there was no statistically significant linear dependence of the mean of DAs on corporate governance. Additionally, no statistically significant effect for internal audit, audit committee and board of directors on earnings management was detected. However, the results revealed that there was a slight negative effect for internal audit scope of work and independence and audit committee independence on DAs.

This research paper is applied on Saudi Arabia, a Middle East country with specific characteristics, that is, a specific context, and, therefore, the results must be interpreted within this context

Regulators of Saudi corporations may need to reassess the effectiveness of corporate governance requirements issued by the Capital Market Authority and the actual implementation of these requirements. Researchers also may need further investigation of this phenomenon within its context.

The results of the study are very important to the Saudi society because they put a big question mark on the relevance of corporate governance of the Saudi shareholding companies

The paper provides new evidence about the effect of corporate governance mechanisms on earnings management in a Middle East environment, which may suggest that there is a need to expand this study using other methodologies to delve into the depths and understand this phenomenon within its context.

This paper is a development of a talk given by the author at a conference in November 2000, entitled, ‘How will T&C affect senior management? They, in particular, need to comply’. It examines and comments upon the introduction of and the interaction between the new ‘Training & Competence’ and ‘Senior Management’ arrangements that the Financial Services Authority will introduce at N2 which is expected to be no later than the end of November 2001.

The purpose of this paper is to encourage ethical discernment as a dimension of business decision‐making.

Development of ethical discernment and a process of ethical evaluation in the analysis of decisions made by the auditors and management in the Adelphia accounting scandal.

The paper finds that accounting may benefit from an increased focus on ethical discernment and ethical behavior. Ethical behavior may help restore trust and confidence in the capital market system and reduce fraudulent financial reporting.

This paper presents an alternative to regulation for restoring trust in the financial oversight function.

This paper aims to scrutinize some determinants that affect the functions and roles of contemporary parliaments. In particular, such parliaments attempt to involve in new areas that were not represented in parliamentary study and to play new roles in the areas of development, diplomacy, the establishment of post-conflict peace rules and achieving the objectives of the sustainable development. The study found that the most important determinants affecting the new roles of contemporary parliaments are the constitutional and legal frameworks.

This paper adopts three basic methodologies so as to reach some applicable scientific findings that can be generalized. The researcher has used the descriptive methodology, to shed light on the parliament’s various activities and new roles and to take note of the many surrounding factors and available dimensions that enable parliaments to perform such roles. The researcher has also used the comparative methodology, to study parliaments with a view to identifying their roles in a way that includes their similarities and dissimilarities and the possibility of generalizing the outputs.

The paper has reached many findings, the most important of which are: first, the need to present appropriate amendments to the constitutions to give space to parliaments to play more effective and influential roles. Second, the internal regulations of parliaments must be in line with the attitudes and aspirations of the parliament and its members, giving appropriate cover for playing new roles in various areas.

This study has found that contemporary parliaments can play new roles in various fields, whether internal or external and in different sectors as well, as a result of the great developments and complexities introduced around the world. Such developments and complexities have cast a shadow on governments and affected their abilities in dealing with the issues immediately because of the enormous challenges in addition to the ongoing developments occurring to the legislative systems in the world, at the technical level of the departments and secretariats of contemporary parliaments or for members of Parliament and the institution as a whole.

The new roles of contemporary parliaments have been affected by the determinants of the research, which are the constitutional framework, the legislative framework, the relationship between Parliament and civil society and the relationship between Parliament and the government. These factors cast a shadow over the expansion or contraction of the attempts of modern parliaments to play new roles.

This study has found that contemporary parliaments can play social roles in various fields of a social nature, which is find solutions to the problems experienced by societies emerging from civil wars, which need national reconciliation, for example, the reconciliation of the ethnic tribes carried out by the Iraqi council of representatives between the local tribes to resolve the internal problems, in addition the role of Borondian council by it is trying end the conflict between the tribes of Hotsi and Tutsi.

The importance of the study stems from the fact that it focuses on the most important determinants of the new roles of contemporary parliaments that may be conducted outside the traditional framework of the parliament's study of legislation and supervision. Such contemporary parliaments have played new roles that take the form of political, economic, social, humanitarian, diplomatic and environmental works and other works concerned with the climate and their attempts to end internal and external conflicts and disputes.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of auditability concept as one of the corporate governance indicators that could increase the management integrity practices and public confidence toward the organizations. Nowadays, most business organizations having issues related to the complexity of the transactions, which make it difficult to collect audit evidence and eventually may affect the company’s good governance. This paper highlights the importance of management integrity practices through auditability concept that needs to be emphasized in today’s business environment. Auditability is the ability of the organizations to provide accurate adequate records to be audited by auditors.

A number of databases in fields such as social sciences and economics were used to acquire literature on the topic.

A discussion on the auditability concept through auditability triangle and auditability model and how management could strengthen the governance practices.

This paper provides new inputs to related parties in preparing more comprehensive guidelines on the implementation of auditability practice among the management as to increase the public confidence on the reported financial statements.

Past studies on corruption and anticorruption efforts in Africa lacked the systemic perspective. Yet, efforts of a constellation of state and non - state anticorruption institutions tends to yield not less but more corruption. Focusing on Cameroon (West Africa), this study is a holistic attempt at an institutional appraisal of the scope and effectiveness of the anticorruption system. It is based on a thorough description and a critical analysis of essential structures, functions and processes of the system, with an emphasis on their missions, goals, activities, structures as well as their actual outcomes and limitations. The researcher suggests that, because of the numerous structural and functional weaknesses, Cameroon’s anticorruption system has failed. Clear suggestions for effective reform of the system and rapid corruption minimization are made.

The quest to unravel the mysterious boardroom’s structure that would confer the firm with incremental layers of economic supremacy has emerged as an issue of considerable importance in the corporate governance literature. Despite numerous attempts, corporate governance research has repeatedly failed to establish a clear and unequivocal theoretical linkage between the boardroom type and the corporate performance. Specifically, the optimum boardroom’s structure (i.e. one that would yield maximum economic benefit) remains an elusive dilemma. Undoubtedly, this problematic deserves more scrutiny. This study aims to expose the different layers of dimensional complexities related to boardroom’s research, particularly as it relates to those investigations using the positivist philosophy of research via inferential statistics using hypothetico-deductive reasoning.

The author examines the intrinsic complexities of boardroom’s research using thematic analysis. In the first phase, the author conducts a fine-grained systematic review of published studies in scholarly peer-reviewed journals. In the second phase, the author conduct a phenomenological investigation via semi-structured interviews with 35 seasoned corporate governance scholars with sound knowledge and expertise on boardroom’s research.

The thematic analysis reveals three overarching complexity dimensions encountered in boardroom’s research: an input dimension related to the ontological complexity of corporations. Research on boardroom’s effectiveness entails the manipulation and analysis of a plethora of convoluted and intertwined corporate performance determinants. Such explanatory variables are difficult to capture, untangle and operationalize; a processing dimension related to the methodological complexity of dealing with imperfect and incomplete information. Positivist research often uses large archival databases marred with endogeneity complications; an output dimension epitomizing the epistemological complexity of ascertaining what really constitutes corporate performance. The currently adopted performance metrics (accounting or market indicators) do not adequately depict the essence of boardroom’s effectiveness and corporate success.

Boardroom’s research continues to generate high level of interests in academic circles. Specifically, research on the linkage of boardroom’s structure and corporate performance is both unclear and confusing. This lingering deficiency necessitates the adoption of novel epistemological and methodological approaches to broaden the theoretical perspectives of boardroom’s structural effectiveness.

One key motivation of this study is to entice boardroom’s research to venture in the direction of uncharted territories. Knowledge discovery in this important area would have far-reaching implications on corporate governance best practices, including how to restructure existing boardrooms or how to establish new ones from scratch.

A well-functioning boardroom would justifiably push the firm in the direction of healthier corporate governance. In turn, healthier corporate governance would eventually yield superior corporate performance with positive consequences on key stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, regulators and other members of the profession and the society.

In this paper, the author endeavors to identify and explain the root causes behind the complex nature of boardroom’s research. The author particularly focuses on the factors that blur or distort the causal linkage between boardroom’s type and corporate performance. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first comprehensive investigation that attempts to highlight the inherently complex nature of boardroom’s research. Thus, it fills an important gap in the literature.

In their role as monitors and advisors, boards are expected to address agency conflicts associated with the separation of ownership from control in large corporations. The ability to effectively perform these functions and enhance corporate outcomes largely depends on their influence in decision-making. This paper aims to examine the effect of corporate governance attributes, in the form of board characteristics, on technical efficiency in the South African life insurance industry.

Using the two-stage data envelopment analysis technique, bootstrapped efficiency scores are estimated for 73 insurers from 2007 to 2014 in Stage 1. The truncated bootstrapping procedure of Simar and Wilson (2007) and the tobit estimation techniques are used to examine the effect of corporate governance characteristics and other insurer level attributes on technical efficiency scores in Stage 2 analysis.

The findings suggest that life insurers operate with high levels of inefficiency within a highly independent governance structure. The results from Stage 2 analysis identifies audit committee size and independence to improve efficiency while board independence is found to be detrimental to efficiency.

The findings provide a useful reference point for insurance regulators in developing economies in the formulation of an effective governance mechanism for the efficient operation of the insurance industry.

As far as the authors are concerned, the analysis contained in this paper presents the first empirical assessment of the corporate governance structure and its effects on corporate outcomes in an African insurance market.

Through a case study on the governance structures of the UN, the purpose of this paper is to develop a critique of Public and Private Bureaucracies Transaction Cost Economics (PPBTCE) (Williamson, 1999) as a theoretical lens to analyze internal oversight structures.

The authors explore “probity” and “independence” transactions’ attributes through historical narrative case-based research to answer the question – Why did numerous attempts to strengthen the governance of UN internal oversight structures not relieve “probity” hazards?

The analysis shows that at the UN increasing and strengthening the governance of oversight structures, i.e., incentives, did not relieve probity/ethics hazards as predicted in PPBTCE. Secretaries-General and UN General Assembly, entities charged with oversight powers, systematically trumpeted the UN Charter, breaching probity/ethics and disregarding the supervisory independence prerogative of internal oversight structures, hence failing to contribute to the “common good” and to protect the UN mission.

This paper is the first application of PPBTCE to internal oversight transactions within an International organization context testing probity and independence attributes. The authors find that “independence” outweighs the “asset specificity” attribute whenever decisions on the governance of internal oversight arise. As far as sourcing decisions are concerned, the authority of the sovereign and the independence of the judiciary as well as quasi-judiciary transactions are not transferable attributes and, thus, cannot be contracted along with the actors’ ethics. PPBTCE should be modified to include, e.g. “virtues ethics” behavioral assumption as a transaction costs’ reduction device and explanatory framework for “probity” hazards, abandoning the opportunism behavioral assumption.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the conduct of the audit committee (AC) in terms of its oversight role of audit quality in the UK.

This study uses semi-structured interviews with 11 AC members and 11 audit partners.

The findings show that the conduct of the AC in relation to audit quality involves the assessment of the contents of the reports prepared by the external auditors for the AC. Furthermore, the oversight of audit quality by the AC involves a thorough assessment of the presentation of the external auditors during the interaction and communication between the two parties. This illustrates the AC’s role as an effective monitoring mechanism when overseeing the audit quality. However, the conduct of the AC in overseeing four major areas (independence, appointment, remuneration and effectiveness of audit process) related to audit quality, as recommended by the UK Code of Corporate Governance, provides mixed results. The findings highlight the ceremonial role of the AC in those areas, which demonstrates the limited supporting role of the AC in enhancing audit quality. Furthermore, it is suggested that the effectiveness of the oversight role is influenced by the quality of the chairman of the AC and the quality of the relationship between the AC and the external auditors.

This study contributes to the existing literature by providing additional insights into the conduct of the AC in overseeing audit quality as well as additional evidence concerning the role and effect of the AC in relation to audit quality as prescribed by the UK Code of Corporate Governance.