We all know that the constitution is acted as a fundamental law for all the national people to follow. Moreover, the rights and obligations are also required by this critical foundation. In the same way, to enterprises, Internal Control plays a basic role of the future perspectives and strategic planning. We also find that even the most detail procedures should be designed based on the Internal Control. Therefore, a powerful Internal Control is considered a critical factor for a successful enterprise. Taking several examples regulated by the Ministry of Finance, we find out that government really emphasizes a lot on a corporate¡¦s Internal Control. However, the recent Procomp Informatics Ltd. and Infodisc Technology Corp. scandals, which brought great losses for both investors and creditors, thus have proven to be a failure for decades of promoting corporate¡¦s Internal Control. Obviously, the major failure cause comes from the corporate¡¦s Internal Control. In this study, we redesign the model of Internal Control according to the viewpoint of the ¡§architecture¡¨ in order to solve the serious situation nowadays. Furthermore, with the new viewpoint of the ¡§architecture¡¨ this study is able to reveal current shortcomings of an enterprise. After analyzing the whole situation, we present an ¡§architecture model¡¨ of Internal Control. By adopting this ¡§architecture model,¡¨ we can improve the process of traditional Internal Control and create a stable system helping future development of an enterprise. We hope that this study can open another aspect of thinking serving as a reference on designing and executing corporate Internal Control as well as enhancing corporate governance.

<p>Today, neither employees nor employers seem to take for granted that a person will stay with the same firm until retirement. Yet, keeping employees for longer periods is an impor-tant challenge for firms. One industry where retention is interesting is the auditing industry in Sweden, this because certain requirements are needed to become an auditor. Firstly, the employee needs to have a Swedish university degree, including specific courses within au-diting/accounting. Furthermore, the person needs practical experience for a specific period of time. Due to these statements the challenge of retaining and motivating valuable em-ployees is crucial for the auditing firms, which is why we have chosen to do a case study at Auditing Company X to see how they work with employee retention. We have compared the findings to our chosen theory, which consist of four categories: the hiring process, in-ternal labor market and career, motivation and performance, and finally culture and leader-ship. These four categories are initially based on Leigh Branham‟s book: „Keeping the people who keep you in business: 24 ways to hang on to your most valuable talent‟ (Bran-ham, 2001).</p><p>In our conducted case study, at Auditing Company X, we have been able to conclude that the firm‟s retention practices are to a great extend in line with the theoretical framework. There are some areas that need further attention from the company, such as an individua-lized reward system and communication between managers and employees. Even though there are some parts to work on the most important aspects of retention, such as having a holistic and long-term orientation, Auditing Company X seems to have incorporated this into their practices successfully.</p>

The solution to South Africa’s growing skills crisis subsists in its ability to transform into a thriving knowledge economy. In a globalised world where it has become easy for skills to transcend borders, skills development and more importantly, skills retention strategies, ought to be an integral part of an organisation’s strategic framework in particular, and the country’s skills development strategy in general. Learnerships, viewed as a panacea for the skills crisis, is a legislated skills development initiative which falls under the Skills Development Act. This in turn resides within the Public Human Resource Management domain. A learnership is a vocationally-based training programme which is quality assured by the Sector Education and Training Authority (SETA) and has as its foundation experiential learning principles. To this end, the Institute of Internal Auditors administers the Internal Audit Technician (IAT) learnership. Internal audit is deemed a scarce skill, and the IAT is aimed at increasing the level of internal audit skills whilst filling the skills gap. Presently the IAT is in greater demand within the public sector as opposed to the private sector. This research was based on completed public sector IAT programmes and some key findings included a clear and disconcerting gap in consultation and communication between the supervisor and manager of the learner. Another was that the majority of learners had benefitted vastly from the communication module and recorded visible improvements in the way they communicated. Key recommendations include greater supervisory and management commitment towards the learnership programme and that all public sector internal auditors report directly to the Auditor-General. This will allow for internal auditors to conduct internal audits free of political interference and the concomitant fear from any form of reprisal, especially where corruption is involved. / Thesis (MPA)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville, 2011.

This dissertation has two objectives. The first is to provide a framework for understanding strategic interactions between an auditor and investors in a competitive rational expectations economy. The second is to provide a welfare analysis of auditor litigation in a costly legal environment. We present a model which captures the following aspects: (i) investors in a competitive capital market form rational expectations about their future litigation opportunities against auditors; (ii) auditors compete for potential clients, and they strategically consider the threat of litigation; (iii) the audited firm's production decision depends on audit quality; and (iv) trial is a costly process, and litigants have settlement opportunities. The market price of the firm and audit quality are endogenized. The welfare analysis provides a rationale why society maintains a legal system which provides an incentive for the investors to recover their ex post financial loss from the auditor through a costly legal process, even if they can price-protect themselves ex ante with or without such a mechanism. We interpret the court system as a decentralized disciplinary mechanism for the auditor moral hazard problem, which enables the potential auditee to use an auditor as a commitment device. We examine the economic consequences of legal policies which potentially influence the size of legal costs. When audit failure is clearly defined, an increase in the auditor's legal costs decreases social welfare. An increase in the investors' legal costs has a more complex impact on the actions of economic agents upon which the social costs and benefits of an audit crucially depend. We also study the economic impact of a change from an American to a British rule of allocating legal costs, which was recently proposed by the accounting profession in the U.S. In contrast to the practitioners' common belief, we demonstrate that the British rule might increase the frequency of lawsuit. Therefore, regulators must be very careful in evaluating the accountants' proposal of the British rule, and it should not replace the American rule unless a careful analysis indicates that the net benefit of audits under the British rule is larger than that under the American rule.

No description available.

An examination into dyadic trust relationships within an audit engagement team and development of a model to efficiently optimize trust.

Fraud is an inevitable cost of doing business. Organisations are responding to the pervasiveness of fraud by employing increased fraud risk management strategies. Internal audit is the most effective corporate control available to management to address the threat of fraud. Internal audit as an effective corporate control is studied in the context of the mandatory obligation imposed by The Institute of Internal Auditors’ 2009 International Professional Practices Framework (hereafter, IPPF). This mandatory obligation requires the internal audit function to ‘evaluate the potential for the occurrence of fraud and [to evaluate] how the organisation manages fraud risk’ (IPPF performance standard 2120.A2 Risk Management). At the individual auditor level, the internal auditor is required to ‘possess the knowledge, skills, and other competencies to perform their individual responsibilities’ (IPPF attribute standard 1210 Proficiency). These standards have the potential to increase expectations on the internal audit profession to prevent and detect the threat of fraud. This expectations gap raises two research questions: (1) What are the determinants of auditors’ fraud detection capabilities? and (2) What constitutes expert performance in the fraud detection task? This thesis aims to address these research questions through the performance of two studies. Study 1 used interviews to investigate the determinants of fraud detection capabilities of both the external auditor and internal auditor. Study 2 drew on the results from Study 1 and was an online survey of Australian internal audit practitioners. Study 1 confirmed that the determinants of auditor expert performance in other audit tasks established in literature, namely, certification, continuous learning, practical experience, analytical reasoning, data analysis skills, communication skills, are also applicable to the fraud detection task. Further, the fraud detection task requires key, unique capabilities because fraud has an inherent element of deception and concealment by fraud perpetrators. The determinants of auditor expert performance unique to the fraud detection task include mentoring, technical skills, and the ability to work in a team. An additional finding is the identification of an effective control environment as a determinant related to the environment where the auditor performs audit work. The resulting model of auditor expert performance in fraud detection depicts the relationship of these determinants (independent variables) with expert performance in fraud detection (the dependent variable). The inclusion of new determinants and the revision of the definitions of determinants established in literature provided the solution to Research Question 1. Subsequently, auditor expert performance in fraud detection was defined based on the resulting combination of determinants. This was the solution to Research Question 2. Study 2 was an online survey with new scales of measurement that were developed from Study 1 interview data. Expert studies and pilot studies were conducted to validate these new scales of measurement. The online survey captured the perceptions of Australian internal audit practitioners about the determinants identified in Study 1. The survey data was applied to the model of auditor expert performance in fraud detection. The main findings of this study are: (1) the assessment of the effectiveness of the strategies to develop auditors’ knowledge of fraud and fraud detection - mentoring, practical experience, continuous learning, and certification; (2) the assessment of the effectiveness of each determinant in contributing towards auditor expert performance in fraud detection. The findings of this thesis supported the expectation that the uniqueness of the fraud detection task impacted on the composition of auditors’ fraud detection capabilities and subsequently, the composition and definition of auditor expert performance in fraud detection. The participation of practitioners – internal auditors, external auditors, and fraud investigators - and academics in the data collection and validation processes provided valuable insight into the research design and provided helpful data for the two studies. The main contribution of this thesis is the extension of Bonner and Lewis’ (1990) model of auditor expert performance to the fraud detection task. Next, the resulting model of auditor expert performance in fraud detection provides the internal audit profession, organisations, and the individual internal auditor with an understanding of the factors that impact on the individual internal auditor’s fraud detection capabilities. Therefore, this practical understanding of internal auditors’ fraud detection capabilities has the potential to: (1) contribute to the development and improvement of an organisation’s fraud risk management strategy; (2) inform the policy debate regarding the promulgation of professional and mandatory standards; and (3) contribute to auditing practice and the audit profession through the identification of strategies to educate the audit profession about fraud detection. The final contribution is the research design where the qualitative study (Study 1) contributed to the development of the survey instrument and provided insights into the results of the structural mode (Study 2).

Through the juxtaposition of political economy theory and an in-depth empirical analysis, this study provides hrther insights into the understanding of variables that explain variations in voluntary environmental and social accounting disclosures (VESAD) across national and regional boundaries. Factors from three classes of Thomas (1991) classification schema, the organizational attribute (organizational size and economic performance), business environment (industry type) and societal variable (culture, political and civil, system, legal system, level of economic development and equity market) categories, were included in this project. Listed companies' annual reports were surveyed using content analysis and disclosure index from seven countries in the Asia-Pacific region: Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. The dependent variable, the extent of VESAD information, was measured by four different measurement bases; these were number pages, sentences and words and disclosure index score. Different measurement bases were used to compare and contrast findings from statistical tests to examine if this lead to conflicting or comparable conclusions. Descriptive and univariate analysis indicated that under all four measurement bases the country of origin was an important determinant of VESAD practices in the Asia-Pacific region. Multiple regression and path analysis showed that organizational size, industry type, culture, political and civil, and legal systems were statistically significant in explaining variations both directly and indirectly. The level of economic development was also found to be of important but only indirectly. It is concluded from these findings that social and political pressures placed on companies by the interaction of these significant variables compel firms to provide VESAD information to meet social expectations and to avoid possible government regulation to preserve their own self interests and survival. Economic performance and equity market factors were of no significant statistical influence. Empirical results using data measured by the three units of measurement for content analysis were minimal. Differences were . noted however when contrasted against disclosure index scores. It was concluded from these results that content analysis and disclosure indices measured different concepts, the latter measuring largely a subset of the former. The consequence of this finding, is that researchers, when deciding on whether to measure the dependent variable by content analysis or a disclosure index, will need to define more the relevance of the measurement to be adopted to the research question underlying the study. Determination of the unit of analysis to utilize when adopting content analysis is less complicated as each technique provides essentially the same results.

Zugl.: Zürich, Swiss Banking School, Diplomarbeit. / Literaturverz.

Zugl.: Hamburg, Helmut-Schmidt-Univ., Diss., 2007