Accounting and auditing practices and procedures : hearings before the Subcommittee on Reports, Accounting, and Management of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, Ninety-fifth Congress, first session.

Hearings held Apr. 19-June 13, 1977.

Manual of uniform accounting and auditing procedure.

Mode of access: Internet.

Keister's corporation accounting and auditing.

Mode of access: Internet.

Accounting in politics:devolution and democratic accountability, Mahmoud Ezzamel, Noel Hyndman, Age Johnsen and Irvine Lanley

Book review: Mahmoud Ezzamel, Noel Hyndman, A° ge Johnsen and Irvine Lapsley (eds), Routledge, 2008, 191 pp., £65 (hb), ISBN: 9780415425902

Incorporating jurisdiction issues into regional carbon accounts under production and consumption accounting principles

Despite increased public interest, policymakers have been slow to enact targets based on limiting emissions under full consumption accounting measures (such as carbon footprints). This paper argues that this may be due to the fact that policymakers in one jurisdiction do not have control over production technologies used in other jurisdictions. The paper uses a regional input-output framework and data derived on carbon dioxide emissions by industry (and households) to examine regional accountability for emissions generation. In doing so, we consider two accounting methods that permit greater accountability of regional private and public (household and government) final consumption as the main driver of regional emissions generation, while retaining focus on the local production technology and consumption decisions that fall under the jurisdiction of regional policymakers. We propose that these methods permit an attribution of emissions generation that is likely to be of more use to regional policymakers than a full global footprint analysis.

The empirical assessment of agency accountability: A regime approach and an application to the German Bundesnetzagentur

Regulation has in many cases been delegated to independent agencies, which has led to the question of how democratic accountability of these agencies is ensured. There are few empirical approaches to agency accountability. We offer such an approach, resting upon three propositions. First, we scrutinize agency accountability both de jure (accountability is ensured by formal rights of accountability 'fora' to receive information and impose consequences) and de facto (the capability of fora to use these rights depends on resources and decision costs that affect the credibility of their sanctioning capacity). Second, accountability must be evaluated separately at political, operational and managerial levels. And third, at each level accountability is enacted by a system of several (partially) interdependent fora, forming together an accountability regime. The proposed framework is applied to the case of the German Bundesnetzagentur's accountability regime, which shows its suitability for empirical purposes. Regulatory agencies are often considered as independent, yet accountable. This article provides a realistic framework for the study of accountability 'regimes' in which they are embedded. It emphasizes the need to identify the various actors (accountability fora) to which agencies are formally accountable (parliamentary committees, auditing bodies, courts, and so on) and to consider possible relationships between them. It argues that formal accountability 'on paper', as defined in official documents, does not fully account for de facto accountability, which depends on the resources possessed by the fora (mainly information-processing and decision-making capacities) and the credibility of their sanctioning capacities. The article applies this framework to the German Bundesnetzagentur.

PLEASE CITE THIS: an exploratory paper on citations, impacts and the social accounting literature

This paper seeks to use the increasingly influential citation and impact data to explore the contours of the social and environmental accounting (SEA) literature. Our ambitions are fourfold. First, we offer a more nuanced understanding of the journals in which we tend to publish SEA research. Second, we tease out what might plausibly be thought to be one indication of the ‘most influential’ SEA papers. Third, we offer a substantive cautionary note about the dangers of the careless use of citations as singular measures of ‘quality’ or ‘importance’, etc. Finally, we place the growing SEA literature in a wider context which both flatters and challenges the community that SEAJ seeks to serve.

Foreign assistance : inadequate accountability for U.S. donations to the World Food Program : report to the Chairman, Legislation and National Security Subcommittee, Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives /

"B-254791"--P. [1].

Liberia : need to improve accountability and control over U.S. assistance : report to the Edward M. Kennedy, U.S. Senate /

"B-226281."

Information security : actions taken to improve Lockheed's special access document accountability : briefing report to the Chairman, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Committee on Energy and Commerce, House of Representatives /

"B-223830"--p.[1]

Control, accounting and value-for-money implications of utility regulation:a literature review

This paper reviews and evaluates the literature concerning the privatisation and regulation of the utility industries in the UK. The economic theories behind and political reasons for the programme are considered to give the reader an appreciation of the environment from which these organisations were born and the implications for their continued existence. Once this has been established the paper then considers the role that accounting has played and will continue to play in these industries. This includes consideration of the technical questions which these new organisations are asking and also the role that accounting has in the organisational structure and culture. It draws as a conclusion that these recently privatised industries provide a unique and rich source for further accounting research.

The SEC’s retail investor 2.0: Interactive data and the rise of calculative accountability

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the United States mandated a new digital reporting system for US companies in late 2008. The new generation of information provision has been dubbed by Chairman Cox, ‘interactive data’ (SEC, 2006a). Despite the promise of its name, we find that in the development of the project retail investors are invoked as calculative actors rather than engaged in dialogue. Similarly, the potential for the underlying technology to be applied in ways to encourage new forms of accountability appears to be forfeited in the interests of enrolling company filers. We theorise the activities of the SEC and in particular its chairman at the time, Christopher Cox, over a three year period, both prior to and following the ‘credit crisis’. We argue that individuals and institutions play a central role in advancing the socio-technical project that is constituted by interactive data. We adopt insights from ANT (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987, 2005b) and governmentality (Miller, 2008; Miller and Rose, 2008) to show how regulators and the proponents of the technology have acted as spokespersons for the interactive data technology and the retail investor. We examine the way in which calculative accountability has been privileged in the SEC’s construction of the retail investor as concerned with atomised, quantitative data (Kamuf, 2007; Roberts, 2009; Tsoukas, 1997). We find that the possibilities for the democratising effects of digital information on the Internet has not been realised in the interactive data project and that it contains risks for the very investors the SEC claims to seek to protect.

Social and environmental accountability in developing countries

The principal aim of this chapter is to undertake a critical review of the social and environmental accountability of global business activities in developing countries. While global business activities have contributed to the economic development of developing countries they have many adverse social and environmental consequences which are often under-studied. I explore the role of accounting in making those consequences visible. The chapter, however, concludes that while social and environmental accounting has the potential to raise the visibility of social and environmental impacts of corporate activities it often fails to do so particularly under the current voluntary disclosure regime where corporations can choose what to report and how to report. This is even more pronounced in the developing countries because of their vulnerabilities arising from various social and environmental problems. The chapter argues for a case of ‘surrogate accountability’ as an alternative to the current corporate driven form of accountability.

Accounting and the emergence of care pathways in the National Health Service

This paper examines the effects of New Public Management reforms on the information infrastructure underpinning the work of public service professionals. Focussing on the case of the British National Health Service (NHS), the paper argues that hospital accounting reforms played a significant role in the emergence of standardised models of clinical practice. The paper moreover argues that, under the label “care pathways”, such standardised models of clinical practice became embedded in the information infrastructure of the NHS and concludes by discussing their implications for the work of doctors and hospital accountants.

Municipal accountability: Should regulations similar to the Sarbanes -Oxley Act apply to the local sector?

As America moved into the 2lst century financial scandals associated with large publicly traded corporations brought widespread concern about the reliability of financial reporting. In response the U.S. Congress adopted the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). Undergirding SOX was the belief that improvements in the reliability of an organization's financial disclosures would lead to increased trust in the issuing organization. While SOX is aimed at publicly traded private sector organizations, the value of adopting SOX-like practices in the public and the nonprofit sectors have been recognized. Although SOX-like auditing practices have not at the time of this research become part of the auditing regime for municipalities, the results of this research provide a baseline "read" of municipal finance officers' perceptions of the value and obstacles associated with adoption of two major components of SOX: Principal Officer(s) Certification (POC) and the Independent Audit Committee (IAC) requirements. The author mailed surveys to all finance officers of municipalities in Florida and Ohio with populations of 10,000 or greater which did not contract out the operation of their finance departments. Post-survey "elite" interviews were conducted in an effort to obtain a deeper understanding of revealed issues and contradictions found in the analysis of the results of the mails survey. The findings suggest municipal finance officers are willing to adopt POC but have reservations about implementing IAC. With both POC and IAC the respondents appeared to consider intangible, non-pecuniary consequences as much or more than tangible, pecuniary consequences. Consistent with prior research, attitudes regarding POC and IAC were found to be unrelated to prior adoptive behavior, or personal and organizational demographic variables. Although accounting and auditing are inexorably intertwined, views of the recently implemented GASB 34 reporting model were found to be unrelated to the willingness to adopt POC or IAC. Findings dovetail with current discourse in public sector accounting suggesting local finance professionals may see benefits—both tangible and intangible—to some but not all accounting practices adopted in the private sector. This is consistent with the commonly accepted belief that public sector accounting maintains fundamental differences from its private counterpart.