This research was designed to investigate the relationship between audit risk and the conduct of the audit engagement in the specific context of an oil and gas audit. Because reserve estimates are in the financial reports of oil and gas entities (in the depreciation, depletion and amortization calculation, the limitation on capitalized costs for companies using the full-cost method, and the required supplementary disclosure for companies subject to Securities and Exchange Commission requirements) and because the reserve estimation process is considerably affected by numerous factors, there is a chance that a material error could be incorporated into the financial statement representations with which the auditor is associated. The objective of the research was to (1) identify conditions which are important in an assessment of audit risk in associating with reserve estimates, and (2) determine the impact of some of these conditions on the conduct of the audit.

The aim of this thesis is to explain and analyse Britain's policy with regard to oil and the control of oil sources in the Middle East during the period 1919 to 1932. A great many books, articles, and some theses have been written on Middle Eastern oil, dealing with various aspects of the subject, but none has specifically aimed to explain in detail British oil policy between 1919 and 1932. The nearest approach to it is probably to be found in B. Shwadran's "The Middle East, Oil and the Great Powers" (New York, 1955), which was written, however, from an American point of view, and without access to British Government archives. It is hoped, therefore, that this present work may help to fill this gap and, also, that it may help to dispel the many inaccurate (and often wildly fanciful) notions about Britain's Middle Eastern oil policy which have long been current. The term "Middle East" in this context includes Persia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Transjordan, the Arabian Peninsula, and Egypt, but most attention has been given to Iraq, since it was on Iraq that the main international oil controversies of the period centred. The Persian oil situation has been discussed in some detail, but no attempt at an exhaustive account has been made, since there is already a great deal of well-informed literature written on the subject. It has been found necessary to restrict the scope of the thesis to the main theme of British oil policy, avoiding any detailed treatment of the wider issues with which British oil policy was interwoven. Thus the purely diplomatic aspects of the many issues with which the oil questions were involved are not covered in any detail. In particular, no systematic attempt has been made to place Britain's oil policy in the context of its foreign policy as a whole, either in the Middle East or elsewhere, nor has any attempt been made to examine in full the oil policies (or general strategies in the Middle East) of countries other than Britain. There are several reasons for these limitations of scope. Firstly, the practical reason that, for reasons of space, no single thesis could deal adequately with all the diplomatic and other issues which were connected with British oil policy during the period under consideration. Secondly, adequate treatment of these peripheral issues would necessitate a full programme of research into the archives of the several different countries concerned, in particular those of the French Government and of the United States Government. Apart from the fact that such a programme of work would hardly be practicable in the time available, there is the added consideration that, in particular, French Government archives for the period are still closed. Of relevance to this aspect of the matter, too, is the fact that published works which might be expected to yield much information on, for example, French Middle Eastern oil policy, simply do not contain sufficient relevant information to fill satisfactorily the gap left by the non-availability of French Government archives. A third reason for restricting the scope of the thesis is the need for lucidity. In order to keep what is itself a highly complicated theme reasonably clear, much pruning of materials not absolutely central to the main theme has had to be done, sometimes with the result that issues of great importance in themselves, but having only an indirect link with the central theme, have been given only scant treatment.

M.Com. / Please refer to full text to view abstract

There is a lack of theoretically based, and empirically proven, team training methods for optimising and maintaining effective team performance. The aims of the thesis were to: (i) develop a method to carry out team training needs analyses, and use this to identify theoretically valid intervention techniques; (ii) develop and test a particular type of team training designed to improve team performance in high-reliability industries; and (iii) develop and utilise team training evaluation techniques. A team training needs analysis was carried out to identify the team training requirements of nuclear power plant operations personnel. This resulted in the design of a nuclear team skills taxonomy, in which the specific team competencies required by the team members were identified. Using this taxonomy it was possible to identify four training and three organisational interventions to improve the performance of the teams. The remainder of the thesis concentrated on the application of the most widely applied team training technique, Crew Resource Management (CRM) training. CRM has been used in the aviation industry for over 20 years, and is beginning to be applied in other high-reliability industries. However, a survey of UK aviation operators (n=l13) showed that the majority do not utilise formal evaluation techniques to assess the effects of their CRM training. The main reasons for this are a shortage of resources and a lack of guidance on suitable techniques for evaluating training. Several CRM evaluation techniques were developed and tested. A questionnaire was designed to assess the effects of CRM training on the attitudes of nuclear operations personnel. It was found there was generally an initial increase in the positivity of attitudes immediately after training, and then a decay in attitudes when they were measured again after a delay of six months. A prototype CRM training course was designed, and delivered to 77 offshore oild and gas production personnel Their reactions to the training were generally favourable and, as measured using a questionnaire, a significant increase in positivity of attitudes was found for decision making and personnel limitations, but not situation awareness or iii communications. The ability of the course participants to identify the causes of accidents in written scenarios was also not found to improve as a result of the CRM training. Finally, a European behavioural marker system designed to allow an assessment to be made of the non-technical (CRM) skills of flight deck crews (called NOTECHS) was tested. Data were provided from an experiment involving 105 training captains from 14 European airlines. Following an analysis of the validity and reliability, it was concluded that the NOTECHS system appears to be a satisfactory system for carrying out an evaluation of pilots' CRM behaviours in the aviation industry. The main findings of the thesis were: (i) A multi-faceted methodology was found to be useful in carrying out a training needs analysis, and to identify intervention techniques to improve team performance. However, these interventions must be applied and evaluated to assess their effectiveness. (ii) Researchers must take care when using a team training method, such as CRM, which has been successful utilised in one particular organisation, and applying the same model in another without first testing it in the new domain. (iii) There is a need to develop more reliable questionnaire items to assess attitudes to CRM skills such as decision making and situation awareness, and techniques to assess the CRM-related knowledge of participants. It is argued that properly designed and tested behavioural marker systems provide a method for evaluating the CRM skills of operations personnel, as long as the system is valid and reliable, and raters have received training to use it accurately. As industry becomes increasingly complex, there is a continuous challenge to design, deliver, and evaluate team training. Overall, this thesis has added to the research to address these challenges and indicated the areas in which further psychological research is required. It is only through this type of analysis that team training theory can develop and practitioners can be provided with the tools necessary to design effective team training.

No description available.

No abstract available. / Dissertation (LLM)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / Centre for Human Rights / unrestricted

In the last decade or so political scientists have found the pluralist and marxist theoretical perspectives wanting for their inadequate attention to the causal role of states. In response, a burgeoning international literature has emerged which sets out to develop a state-centred theoretical perspective. This study is deeply informed by the emerging statist theoretical perspective. This thesis explores the relative capacity of the federal state to increase its autonomy in relation to the powerful oil MNCs in the period 1973-84 through an expanded federal presence in the energy sector. Whereas many scholars have assumed that a positive relationship existed between state capacity and the effectiveness of state intervention, Evans and Ikenberry for instance argue that an almost inverse relationship exists between the magnitude of intervention and its effectiveness. In Canada the literature on federalism has long been cognizant of the important role of states. This thesis therefore attempts to fuse the two bodies of literature, namely statism and federalism, in order to shed added light on the development of federal oil policy during 1973-84. The fact that the Canadian state is federal accounts for the recurring tendency for the energy issue to be redefined from its "obvious" focus on state-oil industry relations to intrastate issues (federal-provincial relations). A major contribution of this thesis is to explore the circumstances in which jurisdictional concerns deflect attention from policy substance - and also to those in which the reverse occurs. The thesis finds that when one level of government sought to become more independent of dominant societal actors, such as the oil industry, the intervention, whether so intended or not, was redefined to follow intergovernmental lines of conflict, rather than state-society lines of conflict. The nature of the issues also changed as distributional problems became subsumed under and were driven by the jurisdictional concerns of governments. This increased the policy interdependence between the two levels of government, squeezed out industry interests from intergovernmental deliberations, and generated intervention aimed directly at curtailing the power of the other level of government. This intervention which at first rendered the aggregate state less dependent on the oil industry by for example the creation of Petro-Canada, and later by the NEP, ultimately backfired on the state, at both levels. Important world oil market changes, intergovernmental conflicts and stalemates, deteriorating economic performance, industry reactions, and other mounting economic and political problems undermined the federal government's intervention and led to concessions for the industry. Such concessions were therefore the product of an increasingly irrelevant regulatory framework rather than purely a reflection of the power of the oil industry as such. This thesis confirms in general terms Ikenberry's finding that an inverse relationship exists between the degree and magnitude of intervention and its effectiveness. Evans and Ikenberry see this most clearly in relation to NOCs, that is in their propensity to evade state control schemes and to undermine centralized state control. In Canada the opposite change.exacerbated conflicts, namely the efforts by governments to shore up their capabilities as corporate actors and the emergence of "political federalism" which saw decision-making becoming centralized within each government, in the hands of decision-makers with jurisdiction-wide concerns. The ensuing process of intrajurisdictional policy coordination not only exacerbated conflicts but also oriented the emerging policy instruments along intergovernmental lines. Another contributing factor was the learning process that decision-makers underwent in the intergovernmental arena. In addition, 'policy mobilization' in the NEP served to link Petro-Canada closer to the political objectives of federal elites. Therefore, while the effects are the same in Canada, the process is almost the reverse of the one described by Evans and Ikenberry. Evans and Ikenberry see ineffective state intervention largely as the product of state actors mobilizing societal actors and state and societal actors becoming more closely linked. This study supplements the statist literature by noting that the attempts of a number of interventionist governmental actors to introduce comprehensive and more independent interventionist strategies heightened conflicts, generated inefficiencies and essentially caused the intervention to fail. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

A research study is undertaken to determine if economic incentives exist for noncompliance with regulatory standards, and if accounting related disclosure of regulatory enforcement actions is a determinant of environmental performance.

Doctorat en sciences sociales, politiques et économiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The objectives of this dissertation are to explain the production behavior of OPEC's member countries from 1971 to 1987 and to determine whether there was any structural shift in OPEC's production behavior after the organization attempted to assign a quota to each member. This study focused on political and social as well as economic variables, in order to overcome the misspecification of previous models. In order to achieve the above objectives, the study used the following four models, with modifications: the cartel, competitive, target revenue, and property rights models. The double log multiple linear regression technique was used to operationalize the cartel, competitive, and target revenue models; simple linear regression was used to estimate the property rights model. The cartel model was based not only on economic variables but also on social and political variables. The internal political instability of each OPEC country was measured by the number of armed attacks within the country. The structural shift in OPEC's production behavior between the 1971-1982 period and the 1983-1987 period was evaluated using the Chow-test. The Chow-test showed no significant difference between these two periods for OPEC overall or for individual members. Thus, the two periods were combined so that the study was performed for the entire 1971-1987 period. Because this period of analysis was relatively short, alternative models were applied to pool the data and thereby increase the reliability of the model estimates. A cross-sectional correlated and time-wise auto-regressive model (CCTA) was selected to pool the data and to estimate OPEC's production coefficients. Then each individual OPEC member's production model was estimated and compared to the pooled model. The results indicate that OPEC behaved as a cartel, and that a partial market-sharing hypothesis was significant for all 11 OPEC members. These findings indicate that OPEC was a loose cartel, with only partially effective cooperation on production decisions. Political instability was found to be significant (at the 10-percent level) overall, and it negatively affected production. It was also significant at the 5-percent level for the price-pusher group (Iran, Venezuela, and Algeria). This group was also the only one pooled using least squares with dummy variables (LSDV), because of its common slope and different intercepts. Overall results suggest that OPEC members were basing their production decisions on crude oil prices, excess production capacity, and each member's share of total OPEC output.