Abstract:The business community requires transparent corporate reports to ensure that investment decisions are not based on materially misstated financial statements. This implies that corporate managers, auditors, board of directors, investors and regulatory agencies urgently need to be able to detect and prevent potential earnings frauds. The literature review seeks to improve understanding of the fraudulent financial statement anatomy, its factors, motivations and antecedents-the knowledge of which can improve our detection and prevention ability. The "fraud triangle" is portrayed as an efficient model for understanding antecedents to fraud. Concurring with Zahra, Priem and Rasheed (2005), the paper calls for further research to understand the motivational factors of fraud behaviour as well as adopting forensic accounting techniques to enhance the probability of detecting fraud in a timely, cost effective manner.
Researchers in accounting face a challenge of ensuring that their research findings are rigorous, relevant and trustworthy. In the absence of these qualities, academic research findings are irrelevant or unacceptable. This paper discusses what constitutes "rigour' and outlines the methods of ensuring it in quantitative, qualitative and mixed studies in the social sciences generally and particularly accounting. The paper being wholly conceptual utilises literature review to assess criteria to evaluate rigour under the commonly used research approaches. The paper provides an in-depth discussion on validity and reliability issues with their threats under quantitative, qualitative and mixed research approaches. The study concludes with observations that rigour in mixed research is not a mere summation of rigour in quantitative and qualitative components of the mixed design. The paper also concludes that research rigour is enhanced through validity and reliability addressed differently with alternative terms under the three different research approaches in accounting.
The 2018 Nigerian Code of Corporate Governance demands responsible behaviour and environmental sensitivity from all companies in Nigeria. However, the extent of environmental reporting amongst firms in Nigeria is still low and not a listing requirement despite the trend of disclosure practices by firms around the world. As a step towards addressing this shortcoming, the objective of this paper is to examine the effect of diversity-of-board on environmental reporting of listed manufacturing companies in Nigeria, and further explores the moderating effect of audit committee. Board size, Board independence and directors share ownership was used as a composite index to proxy for Diversity-of-board and Environmental reporting was graded using ISO14031 index. The study has a population of 61 listed manufacturing firms and a sample size of 36 firms which was arrived at using stratified sampling criteria. Through content analysis, secondary data was collected from the annual report of the sampled companies from the period 2002 to 2019. Using descriptive statistics and linear multiple regression, findings from this study revealed that before moderation, diversity-of-board has no significant effect on environmental reporting (t= -1.80, P˂ 0.001). However, the study found that audit committee significantly moderates the effect of diversity-of-board on environmental reporting (t= -3.67, P˂ 0.001). Since the moderating effect of audit committee on diversity-of-board and environmental reporting is negative the study concludes that both diversity-of-board and audit committee do not strengthen environmental reporting. The study recommended that the financial reporting council of Nigeria should include environmental committee as one of the mandatory committee in the code of corporate governance who will specifically handle environmental issues.
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