The small business CGT concessions: Evidence from the perspective of the tax practitioner

On 21 September 1999 Division 152 was inserted into the Income Tax Assessment Act (1997) (ITAA 1997). Division 152 contains the small business CGT concessions, which enables eligible small business taxpayers to reduce the amount of tax payable on capital gains arising from certain CGT events that occur after 11:45 am on 21 September 1999. One of the principal objectives of the legislation is to provide a concessionary regime for small business owners who do not have the same ability to access the concessionary superannuation regime generally available to employees. When announcing the introduction of the concessions the then Federal Treasurer, Mr Peter Costello, specifically stated that the objective of Division 152 was to provide ‘small business people with access to funds for retirement or expansion’. The purpose of this article is to: one, assess the extent to which small business taxpayers understand the CGT small business concessions, particularly when considering the sale of their business; two, determine which of the four small business CGT concessions are most commonly adopted and/or recommended by tax practitioners to clients; and three, to determine whether the superannuation changes in relation to the capping of the concessional superannuation thresholds have had an impact on the use of the small business retirement concession.

Implicating animals: The symbolic power of scapegoating animals in marine pollution debates

Animals are often used as symbols in policy debates and media accounts of marine pollution. Images of miserable oil-soaked marine birds and mammals are prominent following high profile oil spills such as the Exxon Valdez, Prestige and Pacific Adventurer incidents. Portrayed as hapless victims, these animal actors are not only cast as powerful symbols of the effects of anthropogenic pollution but also represent an environment in crisis. Animals, like the broader environment, are seen as something which is acted upon. Less attention has been given to the ways in which animals have been cast as either the cause of marine pollution or as having the potential to actively mitigate the potential impacts of anthropogenic marine pollution. This article explores how animals are constructed with respect to vessel-sourced sewage pollution. Through a process of interpretive policy analysis, drawing on media reports and responses to an Australian regulatory review process this study found that, when defending the perceived right to pollute recreational boaters implicated animals such as dogs, fish, turtles, dolphins and seabirds in their pollution discourses. Scapegoating was an important rhetorical feature of claims-making strategies designed to avoid responsibility for changing sewage disposal practices.

Automotive modal lock-in: The role of path dependence and large socio-economic regimes in market failure

This paper addresses less recognised factors which influence the diffusion of a particular technology. While an innovation’s attributes and performance are paramount, many fail because of external factors which favour an alternative. This paper, with theoretic input from diffusion, lock-in and path-dependency, presents a qualitative study of external factors that influenced the evolution of transportation in USA. This historical account reveals how one technology and its emergent systems become dominant while other choices are overridden by socio-political, economic and technological interests which include not just the manufacturing and service industries associated with the automobile but also government and market stakeholders. Termed here as a large socio-economic regime (LSER),its power in ensuring lock-in and continued path-dependency is shown to pass through three stages, weakening eventually as awareness improves. The study extends to transport trends in China, Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia and they all show the dominant role of an LSER. As transportation policy is increasingly accountable to address both demand and environmental concerns and innovators search for solutions, this paper presents important knowledge for innovators, marketers and policy makers for commercial and societal reasons, especially when negative externalities associated with an incumbent transportation technology may lead to market failure.

Culture in Business Process Management: How cultural values determine BPM success

There is consensus among practitioners and academics that culture is a critical factor that is able to determine success or failure of BPM initiatives. Yet, culture is a topic that seems difficult to grasp and manage. This may be the reason for the overall lack of guidance on how to address this topic in practice. We have conducted in-depth research for more than three years to examine why and how culture is relevant to BPM. In this chapter, we introduce a framework that explains the role of culture in BPM. We also present the relevant cultural values that compose a BPM culture, and we introduce a tool to examine the supportiveness of organizational cultures for BPM. Our research results provide the basis for further empirical analyses on the topic and support practitioners in the management of culture as an important factor in BPM initiatives.

Interactive relationships among multiple dimensions of professional commitment: Implications for stress outcomes in lawyers

The purpose of this study was to examine the main and interactive effects of four dimensions of professional commitment on strain (i.e., depression, anxiety, perceived health status, and job dissatisfaction) for a sample of 176 law professionals. The study utilized a two-wave design in which professional commitment and strain were measured at Time 1 and strain was measured again at Time 2 (T2), 2 months later. A significant two-way interaction indicated that high affective commitment was related to less T2 job dissatisfaction only for lawyers with low accumulated costs. A significant four-way interaction indicated that high affective professional commitment was only related to fewer symptoms of T2 anxiety for lawyers with high normative professional commitment and both low limited alternatives and accumulated costs. A similar pattern of results emerged in regard to T2 perceived health status. The theoretical and practical implications of these results for career counselors are discussed.

Is group more cost effective than individual cognitive behaviour therapy? The evidence is not solid yet

This paper critically evaluates the empirical evidence of 36 studies regarding the comparative cost-effectiveness of group and individual cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) as a whole, and also for specific mental disorders (e.g. depression, anxiety, substance abuse) or populations (e.g. children). Methods of calculating costs, as well as methods of comparing treatment outcomes were appraised and criticized. Overall, the evidence that group CBT is more cost-effective than individual CBT is mixed, with group CBT appearing to be more cost effective in treating depression and children, but less cost effective in treating drugs and alcohol dependence, anxiety and social phobias. In addition, methodological weaknesses in the studies assessed are noted. There is a need to improve cost calculation methodology, as well as more solid and a greater number of empirical cost-effectiveness studies before a firm conclusion can be reached that group CBT is more cost effective then individual CBT.

Fast and accurate business process drift detection

Business processes are prone to continuous and unexpected changes. Process workers may start executing a process differently in order to adjust to changes in workload, season, guidelines or regulations for example. Early detection of business process changes based on their event logs – also known as business process drift detection – enables analysts to identify and act upon changes that may otherwise affect process performance. Previous methods for business process drift detection are based on an exploration of a potentially large feature space and in some cases they require users to manually identify the specific features that characterize the drift. Depending on the explored feature set, these methods may miss certain types of changes. This paper proposes a fully automated and statistically grounded method for detecting process drift. The core idea is to perform statistical tests over the distributions of runs observed in two consecutive time windows. By adaptively sizing the window, the method strikes a trade-off between classification accuracy and drift detection delay. A validation on synthetic and real-life logs shows that the method accurately detects typical change patterns and scales up to the extent it is applicable for online drift detection.

Log delta analysis: Interpretable differencing of Business process event logs

This paper addresses the problem of identifying and explaining behavioral differences between two business process event logs. The paper presents a method that, given two event logs, returns a set of statements in natural language capturing behavior that is present or frequent in one log, while absent or infrequent in the other. This log delta analysis method allows users to diagnose differences between normal and deviant executions of a process or between two versions or variants of a process. The method relies on a novel approach to losslessly encode an event log as an event structure, combined with a frequency-enhanced technique for differencing pairs of event structures. A validation of the proposed method shows that it accurately diagnoses typical change patterns and can explain differences between normal and deviant cases in a real-life log, more compactly and precisely than previously proposed methods.

Participative behaviour of organisational leaders: The perspective of the Bhutanese corporate sector

Explored in this study are the participative behaviour of organisational leaders in the emerging for-profit sector in Bhutan. Leaders engage primarily in verbal participative behaviour with subordinates when making organisational decisions especially if they believe in the importance of the contribution of participation to organization effectiveness. Leaders who believe in high power distance however are less likely to engage in both verbal participative behaviour and consultative participative behaviour. The research contributes to our understanding of participative decision making by identifying dimensions of participative behavior in the context of emerging economies.

Evidence-based business process management: Using digital opportunities to drive organizational innovation

Process improvement and innovation are risky endeavors, like swimming in unknown waters. In this chapter, I will discuss how process innovation through BPM can benefit from Research-as-a-Service, that is, from the application of research concepts in the processes of BPM projects. A further subject will be how innovations can be converted from confidence-based to evidence-based models due to affordances of digital infrastructures such as large-scale enterprise soft-ware or social media. I will introduce the relevant concepts, provide illustrations for digital capabilities that allow for innovation, and share a number of key takeaway lessons for how organizations can innovate on the basis of digital opportunities and principles of evidence-based BPM: the foundation of all process decisions in facts rather than fiction.

Liquid Business Process Model Collections

Many organizations realize that increasing amounts of data (“Big Data”) need to be dealt with intelligently in order to compete with other organizations in terms of efficiency, speed and services. The goal is not to collect as much data as possible, but to turn event data into valuable insights that can be used to improve business processes. However, data-oriented analysis approaches fail to relate event data to process models. At the same time, large organizations are generating piles of process models that are disconnected from the real processes and information systems. In this chapter we propose to manage large collections of process models and event data in an integrated manner. Observed and modeled behavior need to be continuously compared and aligned. This results in a “liquid” business process model collection, i.e. a collection of process models that is in sync with the actual organizational behavior. The collection should self-adapt to evolving organizational behavior and incorporate relevant execution data (e.g. process performance and resource utilization) extracted from the logs, thereby allowing insightful reports to be produced from factual organizational data.

BPMN Miner: Automated Discovery of BPMN Process Models with Hierarchical Structure

Existing techniques for automated discovery of process models from event logs gen- erally produce flat process models. Thus, they fail to exploit the notion of subprocess as well as error handling and repetition constructs provided by contemporary process modeling notations, such as the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). This paper presents a technique for automated discovery of hierarchical BPMN models con- taining interrupting and non-interrupting boundary events and activity markers. The technique employs functional and inclusion dependency discovery techniques in order to elicit a process-subprocess hierarchy from the event log. Given this hierarchy and the projected logs associated to each node in the hierarchy, parent process and subprocess models are then discovered using existing techniques for flat process model discovery. Finally, the resulting models and logs are heuristically analyzed in order to identify boundary events and markers. By employing approximate dependency discovery tech- niques, it is possible to filter out noise in the event log arising for example from data entry errors or missing events. A validation with one synthetic and two real-life logs shows that process models derived by the proposed technique are more accurate and less complex than those derived with flat process discovery techniques. Meanwhile, a validation on a family of synthetically generated logs shows that the technique is resilient to varying levels of noise.

Service Interface Synthesis in Business Networks

Mismatches between services needing to interoperate have been addressed through the adaptation of structural and behavioural interfaces of services, which in practice incur long lead time through manual, coding effort. We propose a framework, complementary to con- ventional service adaptation, to synthesise service interfaces in the open setting of business networks, allowing consumers to introspect service interfaces and formulate service invocations. The framework also allows evolved service requests, as new features of service capabilities are discov- ered, through interactions with other, similar services. Finally the frame- work fosters reuse of adaptation efforts through normalisation of struc- tural and behavioural interfaces of similar services. This paper provides a first exposition of the service interface synthesis framework, describing patterns containing novel requirements for unilateral service adaptation and detailing the interface synthesis technique. Complex examples of ser- vices drawn from commercial logistic systems are then used to validate the synthesis technique and identify open challenges and future research directions.

BP-XACML: An authorisation policy language for business processes

XACML has become the defacto standard for enterprise- wide, policy-based access control. It is a structured, extensible language that can express and enforce complex access control policies. There have been several efforts to extend XACML to support specific authorisation models, such as the OASIS RBAC profile to support Role Based Access Control. A number of proposals for authorisation models that support business processes and workflow systems have also appeared in the literature. However, there is no published work describing an extension to allow XACML to be used as a policy language with these models. This paper analyses the specific requirements of a policy language to express and enforce business process authorisation policies. It then introduces BP-XACML, a new profile that extends the RBAC profile for XACML so it can support business process authorisation policies. In particular, BP-XACML supports the notion of tasks, and constraints at the level of a task instance, which are important requirements in enforcing business process authorisation policies.

Geography and international assessment: Opportunity or distraction

Assessments of students in primary and secondary education are debated among practitioners, policy-makers, and parents. In some countries, assessment scores serve a criterion for passage between levels of education, for example, from secondary school to post-secondary education. Those practices are often traditions and while they come under criticism, they are a long-accepted part of the educational practices within a country. In those countries, the students’ assessment and examination scores are posted in public places or published in local news media. In other countries, assessments are used for the periodic checks on individual student progress. The results of assessments may be used for rating schools, and in some cases, they are used for evaluating the performance of teachers. Assessments are used less often to analyze student performance and make judgments regarding the performance of the curriculum. Even less often, assessments serve to critically establish strategies for the improvement of student learning and educational practices. The ends on the continuum of the assessment debate often focus on the opportunities that assessments present to improve education on one end. The other end is that assessments serve as a major distraction from the important work of teachers by removing classroom room time from instruction. The debate on those issues continues.