This study reveals themes and trends in accounting research over the past 20 years by utilizing natural language processing and text‐mining techniques. We generated a corpus consisting of over 40,000 articles through multiple searches in EBSCOhost Business Source Premier, Scopus, and ScienceDirect to gather data from 30 highly ranked (A* and A) journals that were listed and categorized by the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) as the top accounting journals. Based upon predetermined inclusion and exclusion criteria, we eliminated 24,474 non‐empirical articles and those with no abstracts, resulting in 16,449 abstracts. The text‐mining analyses reveal 15 distinct clusters, with five clusters showing downward trends, six trending upward, and four maintaining stability. The downward trending clusters are: (1) capital markets; (2) financial reporting; (3) accounting education, careers, and diversity; (4) earnings/markets; and (5) accounting history and capitalism. Trending upward are: (1) critical accounting; (2) auditing; (3) corporate governance; (4) corporate social responsibility; (5) debt financing; and (6) financial markets and forecasting. Stable clusters are: (1) managerial accounting; (2) international accounting standards; (3) taxation; and (4) governmental accounting. This study introduces an innovative method for discerning themes and trends in accounting research and offers a guide to neophyte accounting faculty for determining publishing outlets for research. In utilizing our findings to drill down and provide more detailed knowledge, it also serves as a reference point for future text‐mining studies.

ABSTRACT We contribute to the literature by examining, for the first time, degrees of separation of duties and ask whether SOD is an effective preventive control. We develop a mathematical model of the theoretical number of organizational fraud incidents, with and without SOD. We find that SOD results in the same or increased possibilities of fraud, relative to a lack of SOD, and that SOD needs to prevent 99 percent of frauds to always be an effective preventive control. Moreover, SOD's effectiveness is impaired by collusion. We suspect, however, that while acknowledging this impairment most people disregard or assign a low probability to collusion. We find that even when we assign low probabilities, the sheer number of possible collusive engagements weakens SOD as an effective preventive control. We illustrate our results with evidence provided by the Association for Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE).

•Provides an overview of the basic concepts of the AR confirmation process and basics of sampling.•Students will learn how to calculate sample size and simulate confirmation testing for the required sample.•Requires students to complete audit work papers in excel to mimic real world environments.•Student will form conclusions based on the audit evidence provided by the simulation.

Summary The literature on corporate governance (CG) has been expanding at an unprecedented rate since major corporate scandals surfaced, such as Enron, WorldCom, and HealthSouth. Corresponding with accounting's important role in CG, accounting scholars increasingly have investigated CG in recent years, so the body of literature is growing. Although previous attempts have been made to summarize extant literature on CG via reviews, none of these attempts has utilized recent developments in text analyses and natural language processing. This study uses latent semantic and topic analyses to address this research gap by analysing abstracts from 1,399 articles in all accounting journals that the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) has rated A and A*. The ABDC journal list is widely recognized as a journal‐quality indicator across many universities worldwide. The analyses revealed 10 distinct research topics on CG in the ABDC's top accounting journals. The results presented include the five most representative articles for each topic, as distinguished by topic scores. This study carries important practice and policy implications, as it reveals major research streams and exhibits how researchers respond to various CG problems.

Predatory journals operate as vanity presses, typically charging large submission or publication fees and requiring little peer review. The consequences of such journals are wide reaching, affecting the integrity of the legitimate journals they attempt to imitate, the reputations of the departments, colleges, and universities of their contributors, the actions of accreditation bodies, the reputations of their authors, and perhaps even the generosity of academic benefactors. Using a stakeholder analysis, our study of predatory journals suggests that most stakeholders gain little in the short run from such publishing and only the editors or owners of these journals benefit in the long run. We also discuss counter-measures that academic and administrative faculty can employ to thwart predatory publishing.

•Ghostwriters complete coursework for your students – a growing problem.•Ghostwriting affects faculty, academic institutions, and accounting practitioners.•Few states outlaw ghostwriting, and no federal law prevents it.•A pilot study we conducted shows that even new authentication software is imperfect.•Accounting professors can help control ghostwriting following our best practices.

This paper develops a model of firm operational performance in the aftermath of an ERP implementation based upon subjects' perceptions. We obtained a unique set of data for 198 public Chinese manufacturing companies involved in enterprise resource planning ERP implementations from 1993 to 2006. We collected fundamental data from a survey of these companies, and then analysed their ERP implementations and post-implementation operational performances. We use subjects' perceptions to model firm operational performance as a function of effective business process improvement BPI that is related to effective ERP implementation and post-implementation systems integration. These intervening factors, in turn, are modelled as a function of both the level of CEO involvement and the extent of business process reengineering BPR. We find that operational performance is positively associated with BPI, which is positively related to perceived ERP effectiveness and post-implementation systems integration, and that these are positively related to both the level of CEO involvement and the extent of BPR. Finally, competition and organisational change factors, along with ERP intensity variables are found to be effective controls in the underlying conceptual model.

ABSTRACT: This case illustrates how accounting rules impact the public interest and vice versa. The setting is a gray area of accounting in which management, the external auditors, the SEC, and international accounting standard setters may have differing opinions about the accounting treatment. Students consider the situation in which an accounting rule leads to a business and societal problem. They gain an understanding of how this happens and how such problems can be addressed. The context for this case is a revenue recognition issue for bill-and-hold sales. It also provides students with the opportunity to consider the real-world implications of accrual- versus cash-based accounting. This case is useful for intermediate- to graduate-level financial accounting classes or an accounting capstone class.

ABSTRACT: A variety of relationships can develop between accounting academics, academic units, and external sponsors that raise issues of ethical propriety. External donors may seek to influence academic decisions by applying pressure on recipients to gain favored treatment. We believe these types of situations are on the rise because of increased commercialization of universities. In this study, we examine relationships between accounting academics and external sponsors that challenge academic independence because of conflicts of interest when donors seek to impose conditions on financial support. We solicit the opinions of academic accountants about how likely they are to go along with the conditions. We link these activities to the following ethical issues: fair-mindedness, objectivity, and integrity. We conclude that the more experienced accounting academics (i.e., full professors, current chairs, holders of endowed chairs, and designated faculty fellows) are less likely to engage in ethically questionable relationships with external sponsors than academics who are less experienced. The results are driven primarily by two cases: allowing a Big 4 CPA firm to interview students before other firms as a condition of continued recruiting, and allowing a firm to decide on the recipient of a named faculty fellowship.

This article uses the fictitious company RDA from the movie Avatar as a textbook case of corporate non-sustainability. We provide a list of mistakes RDA made and provide parallel corporate examples in our own society in the areas of stakeholder analysis, corporate governance and systems thinking using the triple bottom line. For each area we present a framework that companies could use to operate in a more sustainable manner.

Yes, your test bank and solutions manual are for sale and it is very easy for students to acquire them. Using a stakeholder framework, we analyze the ethical issues involved in acquiring, using, and distributing these instructional resources by individuals besides the professors for whom they are intended. We also discuss countermeasures that stakeholders might use to deal with this latest development.

Despite the availability of superior authentication tools, password security continues to be an important access control in modern, computer-based systems. Are strong passwords used in these systems? Under what conditions are users willing to adopt stronger passwords? To answer these questions, the authors examined the websites of 154 organizations and additionally, analyzed 240 responses from a separate survey of password users. In terms of password length and duration, the answer to our first question was “No, strong passwords are not used.” The answer to our second question regarding willingness to adopt stronger passwords appears to depend upon how often users must change them.

This paper is a proposal to develop conceptual and practical frameworks for evolving corporations seeking to improve their managerial performance in complex environments with actionable strategies for dealing with social, environmental and corporate governance issues. These frameworks are coalesced by social contract theory that extends the traditional view of the firm as a nexus of contracts to a broader view of the firm as a nexus of social contracts. A re-balanced scorecard is proposed to induce and evaluate management performance that captures important dimensions and aspects of the frameworks established for firms strategically choosing to change their long term objectives to include those related to meeting their social contract obligations.

ABSTRACT: Publishers ask authors to sign publication agreements with “indemnity clauses” to defend themselves from third-party lawsuits. When academics sign such agreements, who is liable if a third party sues the publisher—the author, the author’s university, the author’s faculty union, or only the publisher? This article uses a stakeholder approach to analyze the ethical implications that indemnity clauses have in academia on authors, publishers, universities, and unions. The article concludes that indemnification clauses are most advantageous to the publishers and universities involved, while the authors and unions are most disadvantaged by such provisions.

Equational zero vector accounting systems, based on duality principles and the double-entry model, were designed as ontological control systems to help prevent and detect fraud and errors inherent in non-equational, single-entry systems. Non-equational systems lend themselves to fraud and errors to a larger degree because the internal control inherent in an equational zero vector system has no substitute. We use an analytical analysis methodology to show that an equational zero vector system provides superior inherent internal control over data completeness and data reliability. In the accounting information systems area, the most popular modern non-equational system, the resource-event-agent model, is increasingly being promoted as a replacement for the equational zero vector accounting system. We contend that, although non-equational accounting system frameworks can be modelled with controls, they do not achieve the degree of control inherent in an equational zero vector accounting system without becoming an equational zero vector accounting system.