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Designing a Course Curriculum on Environmental Accounting:
Viewpoint of Indian Stakeholders
--Balram Choubey and J K Pattanayak
The unbridled industrial growth has led to increased concern about global warming and environmental degradation. Due to this increased concern, the business organizations are voluntarily reporting environment-related information in their financial statements and disclosures. Despite the initiatives of these companies regarding environmental disclosures, environmental reporting and disclosures are not adequate in India. This poses a challenge for Indian Business Schools to incorporate environmental perspectives in their course curriculum, especially Environmental Accounting, to equip the future managers with different facets of environmental accounting for improved level of environmental disclosures by Indian firms. The present study attempts to assess the perception of the stakeholders, including management students, academicians, industry practitioners and representatives of regulatory bodies, regarding the incorporation of environmental accounting in the curriculum of Indian management education. The results suggest that these respondents consider environmental accounting to be an emerging issue, requiring further development due to its perceived usefulness as a subject to any organization. The study concludes that there is support for environmental accounting to be incorporated into Indian management education programs and offers some suggestions on the topics that are considered most relevant from our sample of Indian stakeholders.
© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
The Impact of IFRS Adoption on the Financial Activities
of Companies in India: An Empirical Study
--Rahul Kamath and Ruchir Desai
With increasing globalization and integration of capital markets, the world is fast adopting a single language of financial reporting, i.e., International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). More than 100 countries have adopted IFRS and many others have given their consent to adopt IFRS in the near future. India is in line to converge with IFRS. This paper investigates the impact of IFRS adoption on financial activities of Indian companies by using a sample of eight companies for three years, 2010-11 to 2012-13. The study considers four areas of financial activity, i.e., financial risks, investment activities, operating activities and debt covenants. The results reveal that the financial indicators, investment activities and operating activities have been significantly affected by the adoption of IFRS, while financial risks and debt covenants fail to show a statistically significant impact.
© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Financial Accounting Practices Among Small Enterprises:
Issues and Challenges
--Kawalpreet Singh Chhabra and J K Pattanayak
This paper explores the financial accounting practices adopted by small-scale enterprises operating in Dhanbad and Bokaro districts of the State of Jharkhand by analyzing a sample of 52 units consisting of retail shops, manufacturing firms and suppliers of various services through administration of a structured questionnaire. The study identifies that most of the investigated enterprises do not adhere to the financial accounting rules laid down by the appropriate government authorities. Thus, a further attempt is made to analyze the different factors influencing the non-adherence to properly laid down accounting rules by the small-scale units. The findings reveal that most of these small-scale units lack knowledge in bookkeeping, cost computation and compilation, and time management in maintaining financial records, which in turn affects the adoption of proper financial accounting guidelines by these business units.
© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Using the Benford Datasets and the Reddy and Sebastin Results
to Form an Audit Alert Screening Heuristic: An Appraisal
--Edward J Lusk and Michael Halperin
Digital Frequency Testing (DFT) is a simple and potentially effective tool that can be used efficiently in the certification audit as well as in the service of forensic investigations to rationalize the use of extended audit procedures at the substantive phase of the audit. To further the hegemony of DFT, this paper summarizes certain aspects of the excellent treatment of DFT offered by Reddy and Sebastin (2012). In the following, the paper takes up the development of a Benford Screening Window (BSW) that can be employed to create alerts as to when datasets under audit examination do not seem to conform to the DFT profile as corrected from the Benford (1938) paper. The BSW is tested vis-à-vis the log10expectation function, two accounting industry datasets downloaded from COMPUSTATTM, and the 12 years of in-kind committee contributions dataset developed by Reddy and Sebastin (2012). The paper finds a reasonable fit for these datasets for the BSW and hence suggests an overall calibration cut-off taken from the results obtained by passing the Reddy-Sebastin datasets through the BSW. In this paper, the authors have programmed an ExcelTMVBA driven Decision Support System (DSS) to aid in the creation of these audit alerts which is available for free as a download with no restriction on its use.
© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
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