Accounting Commons^™

Accountability In The Church, Professor Ben C Osisioma

Prof Ben Chuka Osisioma

Traditionally, accountability is the obligation to give a reckoning or explanation for one’s actions and responsibilities to a higher authority. However, for the purpose of this paper, we define accountability as the processes through which an organisation makes a commitment to respond to and balance the needs of stakeholders in its decision making processes and activities, and delivers against this commitment. In the church setting accountability involves managing the resources God has entrusted us with, organising for service and mission, and providing programmes to carry out the church’s mandate. The goal is to help people grow in Christ and learn …

Do Changing Reference Levels Affect The Long-Term Effectiveness Of Incentive Contracts?, Lee Michael Kersting

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines whether reference levels change over time and the impact on individuals' risk-taking behavior. I apply expectations-based reference-dependent preferences theory to analyze whether individuals' reference levels change over time in an economic setting. The theory suggests that individuals develop reference levels based on expectations of future outcomes (Koszegi and Rabin 2006). Therefore, this study examines whether individuals' expectations affect the setting of their reference level and how possible changes in reference levels affect subsequent risk-taking behavior. This study also provides evidence on how budget-based contracts impact individual risk taking behavior in a single period setting. Prior research has …

The Effects Of Procedural Injustice, Rebecca B. Martin

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to test for the existence of procedural injustice (PIJ) in the audit environment and its effect on junior auditor's reporting of time and level of skeptical action. This dissertation theorizes that the conflicting forces between junior auditors' ethical beliefs, formal firm policies forbidding the underreporting of chargeable time (URT), and implicit encouragement from managers to engage in URT result in a unique aspect of the audit environment, PIJ, because entry-level auditors perceive these conflicting beliefs and messages as unfair. In this study, PIJ is defined as the inverse of procedural justice, which is the …

Psychological Distance: The Relation Between Construals, Mindsets, And Professional Skepticism, Jason Rasso

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this study, I examine the influence of construals (interpretations) and mindsets on professional skepticism in auditors. Auditors have been criticized lately for not displaying enough professional skepticism, particularly in their audits of complex estimates (PCAOB 2008). Regulators speculate about and academic research shows a correlation between low professional skepticism and both audit failures and audit malpractice claims (Beasley et al. 2001; Anderson and Wolfe 2002). I hypothesize that prolonging the deliberative mindset in the audit judgment and decision-making process can increase professional skepticism in auditors.

Experienced auditors take part in a 1 x 3 between-participants experiment in which they …

Graduate Bulletin, 2013-2014, Minnesota State University Moorhead

Graduate Bulletins (Catalogs)

No abstract provided.

Reducing Employee Turnover In The Big Four Public Accounting Firms, Erin L. Maclean

CMC Senior Theses

Employee turnover is extremely costly to any business in terms of training costs and loss of pertinent knowledge and experience. This paper explores the contributors to the high rates of employee turnover seen in public accounting by focusing on the Big Four accounting firms, Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Employee retention is a factor of corresponding employee motivation, as seen through the analysis of popular motivational theories and their applications to a career in public accounting. This paper also delves into the possible contributors to the differences in retention rates between males and females in this occupation. Lastly, an analysis …