Holding Accountants Accountable

An essential guide for practitioners on avoiding unethical situations in a fraud investigation—provides tips, techniques, and real-life examples Credentialed accountants, auditors, and fraud examiners who fail to identify fraud and misconduct may be in violation of their professional standards. Among these standards are requirements to exercise professional and moral judgment, act in the best interest of the public, maintain integrity, objectivity, and independence, render opinions based on evidence and documentation, and exercise due care in planning and discharging professional activities. Failing to adhere to professional standards and ethical codes have serious consequences for CPAs, CFEs, and CIAs engaged in fraud investigations. Fraud helps readers avoid unethical situations in fraud investigations and stay within the boundaries of professional guidelines and standards. Author Jeffrey Matthews combines real-world techniques and practical advice with personal insights from his experience as a forensic accountant. Detailing how he faced death threats, retaliation, and family hardships during actual fraud investigations, the author shares how despite serious challenges, he never deviated from professional standards. The author demonstrates how accountants can avoid being caught in unethical practices and examines the common tendencies that hinder the ability to detect, deter, and prevent fraud and misconduct. This fascinating, highly-relevant book will help practitioners: Recognize current and emerging trends to identify new areas of weakness Address time and budget constraints with effective delegation and supervision of lower-level staff Maintain a healthy dose of skepticism by ‘testing not accepting’ Understand the effort and expertise required to perform an investigation before accepting engagements Avoid establishing biases and pre-determining outcomes before accepting assignments A full-featured resource, complete with PowerPoint slides and a test bank, Fraud is invaluable for auditors, accountants, and other certified fraud examiners.

An essential guide for practitioners on avoiding unethical situations in a fraud investigation—provides tips, techniques, and real-life examples Credentialed accountants, auditors, and fraud examiners who fail to identify fraud and misconduct may be in violation of their professional standards. Among these standards are requirements to exercise professional and moral judgment, act in the best interest of the public, maintain integrity, objectivity, and independence, render opinions based on evidence and documentation, and exercise due care in planning and discharging professional activities. Failing to adhere to professional standards and ethical codes have serious consequences for CPAs, CFEs, and CIAs engaged in fraud investigations. Fraud helps readers avoid unethical situations in fraud investigations and stay within the boundaries of professional guidelines and standards. Author Jeffrey Matthews combines real-world techniques and practical advice with personal insights from his experience as a forensic accountant. Detailing how he faced death threats, retaliation, and family hardships during actual fraud investigations, the author shares how despite serious challenges, he never deviated from professional standards. The author demonstrates how accountants can avoid being caught in unethical practices and examines the common tendencies that hinder the ability to detect, deter, and prevent fraud and misconduct. This fascinating, highly-relevant book will help practitioners: Recognize current and emerging trends to identify new areas of weakness Address time and budget constraints with effective delegation and supervision of lower-level staff Maintain a healthy dose of skepticism by ‘testing not accepting’ Understand the effort and expertise required to perform an investigation before accepting engagements Avoid establishing biases and pre-determining outcomes before accepting assignments A full-featured resource, complete with PowerPoint slides and a test bank, Fraud is invaluable for auditors, accountants, and other certified fraud examiners.

In the expanding academic literature on accountability, there remains significant ambiguity about the scope and content of this concept. Boström and Garsten have performed an invaluable service to scholars by providing a fresh focus on how accountability is actually organized in practice. Their intelligently edited collection pulls together a range of disciplinary perspectives on the new organizational settings and instruments engaged with accountability norms. This volume is an excellent contribution both to organizational theory and wider research on transnational governance. Michael Mason, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK This book adds a multi-disciplinary organizational perspective to the theoretical analysis of political accountability and argues for a broadening of the conventional understanding of the concepts of responsibility and accountability. There is increasing pressure for accountability, driven by such factors as the globalization of markets, media reports of corporate misconduct, environmental destruction and the violation of human rights. In response, this book focuses on the development of accountability tools and techniques as well as on the organizational arrangements and political struggles behind such endeavours. This unique study theorizes the emerging accountability and corporate social responsibility movement at the transnational level. It focuses on an increasingly recognized aspect of transnational organizational life, which is often mentioned in recent literature, yet sparsely analysed. Organizing Transnational Accountability will be an important and invaluable read for researchers, policymakers and students of social anthropology, sociology, organization theory, political science and critical accounting at graduate levels and above.

Considers economic concentration within the U.S. automobile industry and its impact on consumers, competition, and technological progress, and its response to Government regulations.

The recent audit failures which have rocked financial markets worldwide have accentuated the need for a better understanding of the link between risk, control and audit quality; as well as emphasising the need to open the "black box" of the ways auditing firms actually function. Reflecting these imperatives, Auditing Teams unravels the organizational and management issues in audit firms that are key to achieving effectiveness in service provision. Specifically, this key research reflects upon the relevance and dynamics of auditing teams and their impact on auditing quality, and specifically responding to the recent claim from regulators which highlights auditing team characteristics as the source of wide variations in quality. By leveraging different perspectives – auditing, management accounting, organization and psychology – to investigate auditing teams and basing on evidence collected from the professional world, this book will provide a unique insight into the role of auditing teams on audit quality. It will be of great interest to scholars and advanced students in auditing, as well as to practitioners and regulators in the field.

Read an Expose’ on the operational indiscretions at Stock Exchanges in the United States. A compelling account of shady business practices and historical events as it affects the economy and the small investors on Wall Street. Be informed about executives of mega-corporations, Banks, and Mortgage Companies that inflate their egos with greed and illicit trading. Susan Shapiro in her writing advises, • “People, who have too little faith in their potential or business acumen to attempt a business venture on their own, turn their money over to complete strangers to do that very thing”. (Shapiro, Wayward Capitalists, 1984), 1