Waste auditing and its applications in improving the dyeing industry environment

A case study on the application of cleaner production opportunities for waste minimization in dyeing industry is discussed in this paper which was conduced by Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft (CDG) South East Asia Program Office in collaboration with several Thai institutions. A waste audit was conducted as a first step in a dyeing factory, which leads to propose water reuse and waste segregation in order to implement cleaner production for waste minimization. Further more lab-scale experiments were conducted to find optimum treatment methods for the waste streams.

Human rights performance reporting : a study of corporations within Australian financial sector

This paper investigates the human rights performance reporting practices of the top 50 Australian financial service companies listed in the Australian Stock Exchange. All corporate reporting media, including annual reports, Social Responsibility Reports (CSR) and company websites, were reviewed to document their disclosure practices for the current period (2009/2010). In considering a number of international voluntary guidelines on human rights, a content analysis instrument containing 80 specific human rights themes, under 10 general categories, was developed to examine corporate reporting media. The results remain intensely unimpressive. The number of companies that disclosed human rights items is extremely low; the majority of the items were not disclosed by any of the companies under investigation. However, compared to CSR reports and company websites, annual reports were the preferable media used to disclose human rights issues. The result indicates how ineffective the voluntary global guidelines are in ensuring that Australian financial corporations report on their human rights performances.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s multiplatform projects : industrial logics of children’s content provision in the digital television era

This paper traces the development of children’s multiplatform commissioning at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in the context of the digitalisation of Australian television. Whilst recent scholarship has focussed on ‘post-broadcast’ or ‘second-shift’ industrial practices, designed to engage view(s)ers with proprietary media brands, less attention has been focussed on children’s and young adults’ television in a public service context. Further, although multiplatform projects in the United States and Britain have been the subject of considerable analysis, less work has attempted to contextualise cultural production in smaller media markets. The paper explores two recent multiplatform projects through textual analysis, empirical research (consisting of interviews with key industry personnel) and an investigation of recent policy documents. The authors argue that the ABC’s mixed diet of children’s programming, featuring an educative or social developmental agenda, is complemented by its appeals to audience ‘participation’, with the Corporation maintaining public service values alongside the need to expand audience reach and the legitimacy of its brand. It finds that the ABC’s historical platform infrastructure, across radio, television and online, have allowed it to move beyond a market failure model to exploit multiplatform synergies competitively in the distribution of Australian children’s content to audiences on-demand.

Voluntary demand for auditing by farm businesses: an Australian perspective

 This study investigates voluntary demand for auditing by Australian farm businesses, a significant but relatively unexplored segment of the economy. Most farms operate as family partnerships or sole proprietors and we thus focus on incentives to audit arising from internal sources (owner-manager), controlling for traditional incentives arising from external contractual constraints (i.e., debt), organisational characteristics (i.e., size), and agency conflict. We hypothesise that an external audit assists management in enhancing internal control by complementing the process of profit planning and control (budgeting) and that increased family conflict provides an incentive to engage external audit. Of the 457 survey questionnaire respondents, 27% voluntarily engage an external auditor and 66% conduct some formal written planning. Results from logistic regression analyses support the predicted impact of both size and debt on audit, and further support the hypothesised impact of budgeting. The positive association between budgeting and audit confirms the complementary relationship. More importantly, this relationship is not confounded by the combined impact of size and budgeting and debt and budgeting on voluntary audit. In addition, family conflict has no impact on voluntary demand for auditing by farm business.

A study of materiality auditing: case study from Libya

The results demonstrate strong agreement between Libyan auditors about the materiality concept. In terms of the international auditing standards, not all Libyan auditors follow these standards. The percentage of the item being audited is the most important quantitative form, followed by the item’s position in the financial statements and the absolute value. The results also identified 16 qualitative factors for materiality auditing decisions.

The development of internal auditing in Ethiopia: the role of institutional norms

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which institutional norms determine attributes of internal audit practices and how institutional changes explain the development of these practices.

Design/methodology/approach – The authors employed a qualitative research approach based on archival analysis and interview evidence.

Findings – Findings indicate that regulation-based institutional norms explain the adoption of internal audit and the function's characteristics in Ethiopian organizations. Furthermore, innovative introduction of internal audit practices originate within individual organizations and eventually get institutionalized through diffusion. Such innovations are associated with organizational size, top management characteristics, internal audit advancement in technology, and exogenous input from the external environment. Widely accepted internal audit practices, as institutional norms, are not always taken-for-granted at the level of individual organizations. The institutional change perspective enables explaining how new internal audit approaches are introduced to supplant old ones.

Originality/value – This study theorizes the development of internal audit practices from an institutional change perspective. Being the first study to do so, it contributes to the understanding of key drivers of institutional change that initiate new institutional norms that foster the development of internal audit through introduction and diffusion of new audit practices as old ones are deinstitutionalized.

Comparing the strength of auditing and reporting standards and investigating their predictors in Europe and Asia

The World Economic Forum conducted an opinion survey to determine the strength of auditing and reporting standards (SARS) in 133 countries. It then assigned a score for SARS to each country as one of its global competitive indices. This is a unique dataset on SARS at country level. Using this dataset, this paper compares SARS scores for 72 countries (41 European and 31 Asian). A multi-phase regression analysis is employed to empirically investigate the predictors of SARS using five sub-models. Findings from the study support existing theory and add new findings to the auditing and reporting literature at a regional level. It suggests that there are nine predictors of SARS which are similar for both Europe and Asia but with different magnitude. In Asia the efficiency of the legal framework and the size of the foreign export market are also significant predictors of SARS compared to Europe.