...Topics MEB (PG) IT What are the benefits of instant Messaging on the workplace? Are these overall beneficial to the companies and individuals? What is the most effective way to achieve sustainable computer technology? Is web usability more important than aesthetics in creating effective web design? Should cloud computing become the future framework for enterprise Information and Communications Technologies (ICT)? What are the most important approaches that organisations should embrace for dealing with cyber-crime? Education /TESOL /Linguistics At what age should a person start to learn a second language? Is motivation the most important factor in the acquisition of a second language? Is electronic media beneficial to children’s education? Teachers have a major role in motivating students to learn. To what extent do you agree? Is computer-mediated learning more effective than traditional methods? Are children better than adult when learning a new language? Should the role of ICT in secondary school classrooms be increased in the study of mathematics and language? What is the role of the early childhood educator in teacher social behaviours in children? Are children over-protected in early childhood education environments? Economics and Business What factors are behind stock market fluctuations and how do they impact? Which have the most significant impact, and why? (suitable for Banking and Finance). How do government tariffs impact on imported goods? What are the pros and cons...
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...Importance of Transparency 7 What Regulation Typically Covers 7 Regulatory Agencies 8 Accounting Reform 10 Conclusion 13 References 15 Abstract Within the accounting profession there are many complex ethical issues that must be dealt with quite often. It is important that the people working within the industry provide high quality financial statements and always pay close attention to ethical concerns that may arise. Since ethics is such a major concern in the accounting industry, a rules based system is in place for enforcing ethical concerns. There are many regulating bodies that exist that enforce many highly detailed regulations that people within the industry must follow at all times. Throughout history there have been several major accounting scandals that have been followed by new regulation to ensure that these problems do not come up again. CLERP 9 and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act are just a couple of acts that have caused significant changes to the accounting world in recent times. This paper will look at some of the different issues that accountants face as well as some of the regulations that seek to end unethical behavior. Ethical Standards in Accounting Introduction The accounting industry is an always changing and constantly growing industry. Accounting plays a vital role in society and business and up until recently accounting was considered to have some of the highest standards for ethical and moral conduct in business....
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...(LDDS). The company was handled by Bernard J. (Bernie) Ebbers, one of the original nine investors, and managed to gain profit within one year of management. In order to maintain 42% of Expense-to-Revenue Ratio, David Myers (controller) asked Timothy Schneberger (director of international fixed costs) to adjust $370 million into accruals account. Sullivan (CFO) asked Myers and Yates (director of accounting department) to order managers in the company’s general accounting department to capitalize $771 million of expenses into an asset account. In 2000, Yates told Vinson and Troy Normand (manager in general accounting) that Myers and Sullivan wanted them to release $828 million of line accruals into the income statement. Besides that, the internal audit was primarily exist to measure business unit performance and enforce spending controls, whereas the external auditors, Arthur Andersen, was an independent auditors which performed the financial audits to access the reliability and integrity of the publicly reported financial information. Cynthia Cooper, the head of internal audit, had brought an issue related to a transaction worth $400 million to the WorldCom’s audit committee but she was told to stay away from that matter. Later, Cooper decided to expand the internal audit scope by conducting a financial audit. In the Board of Directors (BOD) meetings in year 2002, Sullivan had manipulated the information related to the capital expenditure and line costs. By June 2002, Cooper’s...
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...information on the company and its industry in the form of `case study’. Then, as a consultant, you will be presented with some details behind a variety of current issues facing the company. This is called the ‘scenario’. These issues may or may not have been mentioned in the case study. Your role is to produce a report to the board that prioritises these current issues, discusses them and provides recommendations based on them. ©The Chartered Institute of Management Accountants Page 2 Approach The main idea behind the case study is to ensure that the consultant understands the business upon which he or she is advising (this is no less than would be necessary in a real situation). Accordingly, you should begin by reading and analysing this case study material. Analysis can take many forms and provided here is some brief guidance on areas to consider and approaches you could take: • What – so what analysis: note down the key facts from each section of the case study material (this is the `what’), then consider the implications of that fact (the `so what’.) For example suppose you were told that the business did not have a marketing director (the `what’.) The implication here is that the business may not grow to its full potential and may miss out on potential opportunities that arise (this is the `so what’.) SWOT analysis: the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of a business. This tool is probably essential in most business analyses (and certainly for this...
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...Creating an Ethical Organization | | Business Ethics | Saurabh | How to Create an Ethical Workplace? Ethics in the workplace are vital, even to small business owners. No company wants to be known as unethical, and employees are more apt to display higher morale and more productivity when they know they are working for a morally sound company. It is important to create a conscientious workplace that is transparent, both to employees as well as the general public. Small business owners should never tolerate inappropriate behavior in an employee and employees should be properly trained on what is considered unethical and ethical. * Set an example for your workforce. In order for employees to behave in an ethical manner, they need to know that they are working for a moral boss. They will be much less likely to display signs of unethical behavior if they know that this type of behavior will not be tolerated or ignored. * Create a policy dealing with ethics. This company policy should state your expectations for your employees as well as outline what is and is not considered acceptable. Having a clearly written policy will help you take action should an employee act unethically. * Allow employees to report unethical behavior in a safe environment. No one enjoys ratting out a fellow employee, particularly if it will be made known who turned the person in. Give your employees a safe and anonymous way to air their complaints so that you can investigate the...
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...Accounting scandals are political or business scandals which arise with the disclosure of financial misdeeds by trusted executives of corporations or governments. Such misdeeds typically involve complex methods for misusing or misdirecting funds, overstating revenues, understating expenses, overstating the value of corporate assets or underreporting the existence of liabilities, sometimes with the cooperation of officials in other corporations or affiliates. In public companies, this type of "creative accounting" can amount to fraud, and investigations are typically launched by government oversight agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the United States. Causes: It is fairly easy for a top executive to reduce the price of his/her company's stock – due to information asymmetry. The executive can accelerate accounting of expected expenses, delay accounting of expected revenue, engage in off balance sheet transactions to make the company's profitability appear temporarily poorer, or simply promote and report severely conservative (e.g. pessimistic) estimates of future earnings. Such seemingly adverse earnings news will be likely to (at least temporarily) reduce share price. (This is again due to information asymmetries since it is more common for top executives to do everything they can to window dress their company's earnings forecasts). There are typically very few legal risks to being 'too conservative' in one's accounting and earnings estimates...
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...expectations on returns on plan assets. The problem has become so explicit that organizations are now overwhelmed and are scrambling to rectify the threats it poses. In this paper I will be using the terms “organization” and “firm” interchangeably. This topic is at the forefront of debate and concern for fortune 500 firms. In consideration of the magnitude and reality of the issues I felt compelled to take a deeper look into the topic. Moreover, I will use this opportunity to illustrate the complexity and seriousness of the issue. The task I am about to dive into will require a moderate overview of pension accounting. That is, I will dissect pension accounting from its roots and try to exemplify a story that has a clear beginning, but lacks any real practical ending. As such, in this paper I will cover the following areas in detail to demonstrate the perplexity that aluminates when this is topic is fetched from the dark holes of the financial statements and put into a context that is, too many, preposterous. This paper will clarify the following topics: 1) What is a Defined Benefit Pension Plan (DB)? 2) How has the economy (i.e. volatility) influenced investor and managerial discretions regarding pension related factors? 3) Why ‘financial management’ (Aka. Smoothing) has perpetuated the magnitude of the problem? 4) Why companies like ‘ Air Canada’ are on the verge of bankruptcy? 5)...
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...culture and ethics in an organisation. By Student’s Name University name Date Abstract An ethical climate is part of the whole organizational climate and means the mutual perceptions of how ethical issues should be dealt with and what ethically right behavior. Olson defines ethical climate as the personal perceptions of the institute that affects behavior and attitudes and functions as a reference for the action of employee’s (Collins & Porras, 2000, p, 83). Attention to healthcare and nursing ethics has come up due to a heightened awareness of the effects and complexity of ethical issues in health care environs. Ethical climate can affect the beliefs and behavior of employees when challenging patient care difficulties are debated and resolved in work settings. Numerous studies have revealed the power of hospital ethical climates on job satisfaction, stress, turnover intentions, and ethics. Thus, it seems imperative to come up with valid measures so as to raise the standards of the ethical climate in health care institutions. Ethical climate survey Various self-assessment questionnaires have been established to determine the ethical climate in hospitals and health care settings. The most extensively used assessments are the Hospital Ethical Climate Survey (HECS) prepared in the United States by Olson (Kent, 2002, p.78). HECS recognizes five subscales in the ethical climate of hospitals and has good psychometric properties. Different cultures and countries including...
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...HRM522 Ethical & Advocacy for HR Professionals Dr. Jeanette Horner-Smith December 14th, 2014 “Nike: From Sweatshops to Leadership in Employment Practices” The Nike Corporation is a huge brand that targets athletes, colleges, and product manufacturing. The company was founded by Phil Knight and his track coach, Bill Bowerman, in 1964. “The company was renamed Nike in 1978, and has grown to be the largest worldwide seller of athletic goods, with approximately 19,000 retail accounts in the United States and about 160 countries around the world” (Ferrell, Fraedrich, Ferrell, 2011). Nike built its “good quality” reputation from popular athletic sponsors. Although the brand was growing into a successful sports oriented company, high demand for the product led to thought on how to manufacture more apparel. The founders of the company devised a plan on how to increase manufacturing while not completely blowing their accounts on laboring. The company agreed to take their manufacturing overseas to third-world countries where the cost of laboring is cheaper. “In the late 1980s after going public, the late 1990s began a period composed of combating allegations about labor and human rights violations” (Ferrell, Fraedrich, Ferrell, 2011). Nike was accused of over working their foreign employees, and providing them poor, unsanitary work environments. It can be said that subcontracting was mainly the reason why the scandals occurred. Subcontracting is the process of reducing cost to allow...
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...accountants will increasingly be asked to design systems to control, evaluate, interpret or apply ethical judgement. The following develops the basis for forming ethical judgements. The management accountant fulfils four broad roles concerning ethics: 1. to ensure that management has developed and installed a comprehensive and internally controlled code of ethics. 2. to verify that the code of ethics and its controls are comprehensive and that everyone in the organization understands and complies with it. 3. to report to management any deviation from the code of ethics and its control systems. The Board of Directors may ultimately have to address any failures in the code or its controls. 4. to act in accordance with the code of ethics in making personal decisions. What are Ethics and Morals? Ethics are the rules people use to define and regulate moral behaviour. Morals distinguish right from wrong. Descriptive ethics are codes of ethics as actually practiced. Descriptive ethics provide no value judgements. Normative ethics, or moral reasoning, develops statements about whether a practiced ethical system is good or bad and suggests how ethical dilemmas, which are conflicts between individual systems of ethics ought to be resolved. Metaethics questions the meaning and universality of ethical statements. There is wide agreement that there is no basis for making universal normative ethical statements. A popular, but not universal, view is that ethics are the principles that people...
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...instrumentally, not respecting their dignity, essentially treating them as ‘finance-providing ends’. Maxim 3 is about universality; whether the principles of an action would be acceptable for every person. The fact that 90% of shareholders voted against Goodwin’s pension is clear evidence that this was not the case at RBS. THINK THEORY 2 Thinking of different corporate governance practices around the world, are these just ‘different’ (i.e. reflecting different cultural and customary practices) or would you argue that some of them are clearly more or less ethical from a moral perspective? One could perhaps argue that some governance models are more ethical than others. For example, the continental European model focuses more on employees as key stakeholders than does the Anglo-American model. However, this focus on employees could be to the detriment of other important stakeholders. One could also argue that some models are less ethical than others; the Russian model, with its...
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...Accountants Important to the Accounting Industry, and why their role is Important to Business, Industry, and Society? Virginia Commonwealth University Writing and Rhetoric April 15, 2011 Why are Certified Public Accountants Important to the Accounting Industry, and why their role is Important to Business, Industry, and Society? CPAs became prominent after the 1800s when America started into the industrial era. They mainly did the basic bookkeeping for businesses at that time. As the industrial age grew and the government started to impose taxes, CPAs became more important to businesses as they now had to handle the filing of taxes for businesses. Although many people don’t see how important CPAs are to business, industry, and the economy, as well as, society. With the many changes over the centuries that government and CPA societies have put on CPAs, there have been some big changes in educational requirements, as well as governmental regulations. But in today’s society ethics has become the biggest problem that CPAs have to deal with and yet have more control over in the economy, and especially in business and industry. History has shown just how business and industry has needed CPAs, from controlling payroll and taxes, auditing accounting journals at the local mom-and-pop stores, to auditing financial papers of big corporations in order to let the investors at banks and Wall Street have some sort of an idea of how sound a Corporation is...
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...Accounting theory and conceptual frameworks After studying this chapter you should be able to: & explain what accounting theory is & describe the main attempts at constructing an accounting theory & appraise current developments in the area & describe and discuss the contents of the IASB Framework & appraise the quality and usefulness of the IASB Framework in the context of its self-declared purposes & describe and discuss the parts of IAS 1 relating to accounting concepts and policies & appraise the overall effect of the Framework and comparable parts of IAS 1. Introduction This chapter is about to deal with something that many people believe does not exist – a single generally accepted accounting theory. There is no generally accepted accounting theory at this time even though many attempts have been made to formulate one. According to Eldon S. Hendriksen in Accounting Theory (1977), Theory as it applies to accounting is the coherent set of hypothetical, conceptual and pragmatic principles forming the general frame of reference for a field of inquiry. Thus accounting theory may be defined as logical reasoning in the form of a set of broad principles that 1 Provide a general frame of reference by which accounting practices can be evaluated and 2 Guide the development of new practices and procedures. Accounting theory may also be used to explain existing practices to obtain a better understanding of them. But the most important goal of accounting theory should be to provide...
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...8 Accounting theory and conceptual frameworks After studying this chapter you should be able to: & explain what accounting theory is & describe the main attempts at constructing an accounting theory & appraise current developments in the area & describe and discuss the contents of the IASB Framework & appraise the quality and usefulness of the IASB Framework in the context of its self-declared purposes & describe and discuss the parts of IAS 1 relating to accounting concepts and policies & appraise the overall effect of the Framework and comparable parts of IAS 1. Introduction This chapter is about to deal with something that many people believe does not exist – a single generally accepted accounting theory. There is no generally accepted accounting theory at this time even though many attempts have been made to formulate one. According to Eldon S. Hendriksen in Accounting Theory (1977), Theory as it applies to accounting is the coherent set of hypothetical, conceptual and pragmatic principles forming the general frame of reference for a field of inquiry. Thus accounting theory may be defined as logical reasoning in the form of a set of broad principles that 1 Provide a general frame of reference by which accounting practices can be evaluated and 2 Guide the development of new practices and procedures. Accounting theory may also be used to explain existing practices to obtain a better understanding of them. But the most important goal of accounting theory should be to provide...
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...8 Accounting theory and conceptual frameworks After studying this chapter you should be able to: & explain what accounting theory is & describe the main attempts at constructing an accounting theory & appraise current developments in the area & describe and discuss the contents of the IASB Framework & appraise the quality and usefulness of the IASB Framework in the context of its self-declared purposes & describe and discuss the parts of IAS 1 relating to accounting concepts and policies & appraise the overall effect of the Framework and comparable parts of IAS 1. Introduction This chapter is about to deal with something that many people believe does not exist – a single generally accepted accounting theory. There is no generally accepted accounting theory at this time even though many attempts have been made to formulate one. According to Eldon S. Hendriksen in Accounting Theory (1977), Theory as it applies to accounting is the coherent set of hypothetical, conceptual and pragmatic principles forming the general frame of reference for a field of inquiry. Thus accounting theory may be defined as logical reasoning in the form of a set of broad principles that 1 Provide a general frame of reference by which accounting practices can be evaluated and 2 Guide the development of new practices and procedures. Accounting theory may also be used to explain existing practices to obtain a better understanding of them. But the most important goal of accounting theory should be to provide a...
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