Business Commons^™

Sas 99 & Fraud Detection, Shunlan Lu

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Investigation To Detect The Presence Of Confirmation Bias In The Decision-Making Strategies Used By Litigants In Tax Court Memorandum Cases, Mary M. Anderson

Doctoral Dissertations

Normative decision theory describes the judgment and decision-making process as a cost/benefit analysis based upon maximum utility. One assumption of the theory is full rationality for choices made throughout the process. Due to bounded rationality, however, mental shortcuts become necessary. Use of these shortcuts does not necessarily diminish the quality of the decision. However, a suboptimal use of a heuristic results in a biased decision.

Kahneman and Tversky (1979) identify three basic heuristics: availability, representativeness, and anchoring and adjusting. One suboptimal use of the anchoring and adjusting heuristic, confirmation bias, is the unconscious search for and evaluation of information that …

Valuation Effects Of Earnings Restatements Due To Accounting Irregularities, Tan Xu

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

This dissertation studies three financial topics using earnings restatement data. In the first topic, we discriminate between the market efficiency hypothesis and the underreaction hypothesis by examining their predictions on the stock performance of restating firms in the post-announcement period. Three approaches are used, namely, the cumulative abnormal return (CAR), buy-and-hold abnormal return (BHAR), and calendar time portfolio approaches. Consistent with the market efficiency hypothesis, we do not find significant abnormal performance in the post-restatement period. In the second topic, we test the extrapolation model (LSV, 1994) by examining the relationship between stock price reaction to earnings restatement and the …

Uncontrolled Earnings Management-Financial Enhancement Or Downfall?, Kevin A. Costello

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Since the turn of the century it has become undeniably apparent that many corporations, regardless of their size, have resorted to falsifying financial records in an attempt to mask the true financial health of the company. The reasons for such actions vary from attempts to shore up investor confidence to ensuring perks for corporate executives. These scandalous acts are not a characteristic of a certain type of business. They have occurred across a wide array of businesses including, but not limited to, power and energy, insurance, and telecommunications.

The most common form of record falsification comes in the form of …

Characteristics Of Firms That Commit Fraud, Genie Hanson

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This research paper consists of an analysis of all issued AAERs from September 1995 through October 2003. It discusses who commits the fraud, the types of fraud committed, and the interaction of fraud types and firm types.

Diversity And The Effects On Accounting Students’ Ethical Awareness, Sanaz Shelia Aghazadeh

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Running Out Of Options: An Investigation Of Stock-Based Compensation, Mark A. Powell

Honors Theses

One of the most heated debates witnessed by the accounting industry was rekindled at the dawn of the new millennium, a resurgence of an issue discussed from the early 1990s. Brought to new light, in part by the corporate debacles of Enron and WorldCom (among others), the concern of expensing employee stock options has taken a forefront in the halls of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). Not only is the accounting profession facing a difficult polarization of ideas as to how to appropriately account for stock options, but Congress has also joined in the discussion and has threatened intervention …

An Analysis Of The Integrity Of Students Planning To Enter The Accounting Profession, Bonnie Dye

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Adaptive Self-Regulation And Organizational Politics: Investigating The Effects In The Accounting Profession, Sharon Howell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate whether or not perceptions of organizational politics mediate the relationships between accountants' personality and interpersonal traits and their perceptions of a superior's leadership ability and performance. An accountant who has a higher degree of confidence in his or her superior's abilities is more likely to be committed to a given project, resulting in a better project outcome. This benefits the client and ultimately society as a whole. This study contributes to the accounting and psychology literatures because extant research views perceptions of leadership ability and performance from the perspective of the individual …

Accounting Disclosure At The Organization-Society Interface: A Meta-Theory And Empirical Evidence, Jennifer Ching-Kuan Chen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three studies related to accounting disclosure at the interface of the organization and society. The first study investigates the overlapping perspectives of legitimacy theory, institutional theory, resource dependence theory, and stakeholder theory and integrates these theories into a more cohesive meta-theory of the organization-society interface. The second study examines whether a corporation's charitable contributions represent a corporate social performance strategy or a legitimation strategy. More specifically, study two investigates, from two competing perspectives, how corporate executives rationalize their philanthropic actions. The third study analyzes the relationship between the current tax laws and the fulfillment of corporate …

The Public Policy Implications Of Audit Regulation: Three Studies Related To The Passage Of The Sarbanes-Oxley Act Of 2002, Steven Thornburg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation documents and evaluates certain financial and non-financial strategies used by the public accounting profession to influence audit regulation during the policy formation period of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). The dissertation is comprised of three separate, but related studies. Each study uses prior research in accounting and related disciplines to investigate significant aspects the profession's strategies. The first study evaluates the rationality and effectiveness of political action committee (PAC) contributions paid by the accounting profession to members of Congress. The study finds that the accounting profession rationally allocated more PAC contributions to top congressional leaders and to …

The Harmonization Of Chinese Accounting Standards With International Accounting Standards: An Empirical Evaluation, Songlan Peng

Theses and Dissertations

Using China as the case of a developing country, this study empirically evaluates whether the efforts made by China since the early 1990s to harmonize their domestic standards with IAS have been successful. Four research questions are addressed and eight hypotheses are developed to investigate the current level of harmonization and whether the extent of harmonization improves with the issuance of the most recent Chinese GAAP. Chinese 1992 GAAP, 1998 GAAP, and 2001 GAAP are reviewed and compared with IAS to evaluate de jure harmonization of Chinese GAAP with IAS (that is, harmonization in standards). Firms that issue both A …

An Empirical Analysis Of Book-Tax Reporting Difference And Tax Noncompliance Behavior In China, Feng Tang

Theses & Dissertations

The traditional accounting system in China was directly linked to the tax assessment. The close linkage between the two sets of reporting rules has substantially weakened, as China promulgated a series of accounting standards and regulations in the late 1990s. As a result, accounting for financial reporting purposes does not have to conform to accounting for tax reporting purposes. This divergence between the two measures of income will inevitably cause accounting book income to differ from taxable income. This is because the more the excess of book income over taxable income, the more the magnitude of tax audit adjustments. Mills …