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This study aims to examine the strategies that auditors in Bangladesh follow in identifying and reporting key audit matters (KAMs). The study also examines the factors affecting auditors’ strategies in the identification and disclosures of KAMs.

The authors have conducted interviews with audit partners, chief financial officers (CFOs) and regulators involved in KAMs reporting and monitoring. The authors have used the lens of institutional theory of coercive, mimetic and normative isomorphism and the concept of decoupling.

Auditors have used a decoupling strategy by identifying and reporting greater number of industry-generic KAMs than that of other countries in an effort to minimize risks and avoid regulatory scrutiny, although they disclose remote risks as KAMs and mask severe problem areas of the client. Because of the principle-based approach of International Standards on Auditing (ISA) 701 and because of the pressure and misunderstanding from the audit committee, auditors report industry-generic items and generic descriptions of KAMs.

The findings have important implications for the standard setters and local and global audit firms for the diffusion of new auditing standards in different jurisdictions. Without the development of audit firm-level capability and the corporate governance environment, changes in standards may not be effective in achieving the objectives of the standards.

Although auditors consider that the KAMs reporting requirements provide with opportunities to enhance audit profession’s legitimacy and public trusts, the actual KAMs reporting practices are driven by the market logic, an urge to maintain the status quo with clients and eventual rationalization of the impairment of professional independence.

Given the dearth of prior research on the implementation and diffusion patterns of ISA 701 KAMs reporting, this study fills the gap in the literature. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first known study to examine auditors’ strategic responses to balance among conflicting priorities in reporting KAMs.

The development of the public accountancy profession in the last 200 years has increased the demand for the labor of professional accountants and enhanced the role and status of the professional public account. This increase in both the demand for the labor of professional accountants and for the professional services, which professional accountants provide, has resulted from the growth of capitalist enterprises, as well as institutional work on the part of members of the organized public accountancy profession. The objective of this chapter is to trace the historical development of the public accountancy professions in the United Kingdom and in France in response to contrasting institutional logics in these two countries. While legal requirements for external audits of company financial statements provided the basis for the development of the public accountancy profession as early as the end of the eighteenth century, differences in institutional logics, including differing conceptions of the relationship between individuals and the state, led to differences in the development of the public accountancy professions in the two countries. The primary argument of this chapter is that contrasting institutional logics have influenced the history of the public accountancy profession, which has evolved into one of the key regulatory structures of modern capitalism.

This paper sets out to analyse the role of ethics and moral values in higher education, as well as the articulation with two important professions in the financial area, because ethics and professional deontology play an important role in organizations and society, which have a great concern with corporate social responsibility.

The literature review allows one to build a questionnaire used to evaluate the ethical behaviour and rules of ethics in a sample of higher education students of the third year of an Accounting and Finance course in the Business Administration College of the Setúbal Polytechnic Institute. The same questionnaire was applied to those students wishing to become chartered accounts and statutory auditors. Finally an exploratory analysis was carried out that summarises the questionnaire, categorising in several clusters as result of cluster analysis, according to the variables that had higher scores.

The concept of ethics is not a consensual one among the different investigators: for some it means a set of rules, principles and values that may be mistaken for morality from a broader point of view. Some authors consider ethics as a judging reflection upon morality. Concerning the cognitive dimension of attitude towards ethics, the subject of ethics and professional deontology strengthened the answers to the questions with lower scores. Concerning the affective/assessing attitude of ethics, the subject of ethics and professional deontology strengthened the students' convictions about the importance of the existence of a deontological code, of ethical principles and of accounting information, as well as the question with the lowest score (the entity's interest is more important).

The results of this research confirm the initial hypothesis that higher education students of the third year of an Accounting and Finance course in the Business Administration College of the Setúbal Polytechnic Institute do not know the limitations of ethical behaviour.

This paper provides valuable empirical evidence in the role of ethics and moral values in higher education, because teaching ethics and professional deontology is an essential need of society and is inherent to teaching activity that must be promoted by policy makers.

The purpose of this analysis is to present the history of anti‐money laundering efforts in the United States as it applies both domestically and internationally, and demonstrate how this new legislation, if enacted, will mark a dramatic change in the customary treatment of international financial transactions and to international long‐arm jurisdiction and law enforcement. If enacted as proposed, this legislation may provide the tools necessary to achieve substantial progress in this effort.

This study aims to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of auditor mandatory suspicious activity reporting versus the exercise of professional judgement in the anti-money laundering regimes of the UK and the USA.

The research draws upon the following sources. Firstly, statistics provided by the UK National Crime Agency, 2019 (NCA) regarding suspicious activity report (SAR) filing rates. Secondly, anti-money laundering legislation in the USA and UK. Thirdly, statements made in the political domain in the USA, particularly those which raised constitutional concerns during the progress of the Patriot Act 2001. Finally, statements and recommendations by a UK Parliamentary Commission enquiring into the effectiveness of the suspicious activity reporting regime.

The UK reporting regime does not accommodate professional judgement, resulting in the filing of SARs with limited intelligence value. This contrasts with discretionary reporting in the USA: voluntary reporting guides and influences auditor behaviour rather than mandating it. Defensive filing by UK auditors (defence to anti-money launderings [DAMLs]) has increased in recent years but the number of SARs filed has declined.

The study evaluates auditor behavioural responses to legislative regimes which mandate or alternatively accommodate discretion in the reporting suspicion of money laundering. Consideration of constitutional and judicial activism in this context is a novel contribution to the literature. For its theoretical framework the study uses Foucault’s concept of discipline of the self to evaluate auditor behaviour under both regimes.

It is widely accepted that companies operating in research‐intensive industries need to pursue an “outward‐looking”, collaborative research and technology development strategy. Research collaboration, however, always carries risks, in particular, the risk of sensitive information leakage, be it as a result of purposeful betrayal by collaborators or accidental disclosure. It has been shown that traditional legal and bureaucratic control mechanisms are not able to deal with this problem adequately and that the more “outward‐looking” the research strategy that a company follows, the more it has to rely on social control mechanisms such as reputational concerns of key researchers and the incremental development of higher levels of trust among individuals. This paper analyses the relationship between management control and social control in collaborative research and development in more detail and introduces the results of a small‐scale interview‐based study of the trust‐building and control processes in fine fragrance research.

Contemporary literature has paid scholarly attention to corruption from a variety of competing perspectives. However, broader accounts of the impact of corruption on development in developing countries are relatively scarce. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of corruption as a social impediment to development, which has a devastating effect on developing countries.

The paper explores the relevant literature and the different perspectives that have been developed and conducted for investigating corruption in developing countries. The paper uses publicly available evidence to show that political, economic elite engaged in corrupt practices.

The evidence shows that socio‐political and economic development, politics, power, history and globalisation have continued to reproduce and transform the institutional structures and actors which have facilitated corrupt practices in developing countries. The review shows that large sums of government revenue have been undermined by the corrupt practices of the political and economic elite (both local and international), which have enriched a few, but impoverished most.

The paper seeks to bring the anti‐social activities of political, economic and professionals under scrutiny and offers some suggestions for reforms.

Corruption has played a major role in causing serious damage to the economic and social landscape in developing countries. This in turn, has undermined social welfare and also investment in the public services, thereby eroding the quality of life and producing a decline in average life expectancy.

The paper is a general review of literature and evidence on contemporary issues.

Since the beginning of the 1990s Poland has been developing a system of counteracting and fighting the money laundering phenomenon. Such actions were started because of the need to protect the Polish legal system and the Polish economy against the threat coming from organised criminal groups wanting to invest in Poland the proceeds derived from illicit activities. Poland is an attractive country to them as far as investing is concerned because of the great demand for capital needed to conduct the necessary transformations in the economic and social system.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how, and under what conditions, professionals involve relatives in clinical practice.

Two cases were constructed from two studies in Denmark, theoretically inspired by Bourdieu’s concepts of doxa and position and analyzed with focus on the involvement of relatives from the perspective of professionals.

Support to relatives in practice is rarely included in the way that treatment and care are organized in healthcare. Professionals’ views of the involvement of relatives were characterized by the values of neoliberal ideology and medical-professional rationality, in which relatives are not regarded as a subject of care and support in clinical practice. The involvement of relatives aimed to ensure patients’ participation in randomized clinical trial and to help professionals to care for patients when the professionals were not absolutely needed. Professionals were relatively higher positioned in the clinic than relatives were, which allowed professionals to in – and exclude relatives. Neoliberal ideology and medical-professional rationality go hand in hand when it comes to patient treatment, care and the involvement of relatives; it is all about efficiency, treatment optimization and increased social control of the diagnosed patient. These neoliberal, organizational values consolidate doxa of the medical field and the positions that govern the meeting with patients’ relatives – if it takes place at all.

The results put into perspective how the combination of neoliberalism and medical logic work as an organizing principle in contemporary healthcare systems, and challenge a normative, humanistic view on involving patients’ relatives in the medical clinic.

The purpose of this paper is to make objective descriptions on various money‐laundering techniques and to put forward countermeasures in order to combat money laundering more effectively and efficiently.

This paper based on 20 simplified money‐laundering cases, describes various money‐laundering techniques, analyses the reasons why these methods prevail, and points out the future efforts to be made in the fight against money laundering.

As usual, the ways of money laundering include cash smuggling, making use of banks or insurance company, or making use of shell‐company or front‐company. Nowadays, criminals also turn to real estate, lottery, international trade, offshore company to launder money. Sometimes lawyers, accountants are exploited by money launderers. With the wide use of electronic money and internet, criminals prefer to launder money through non‐face to face transactions. The fight against money laundering is the fight between justice and evil. It is of great importance to pierce the secret veil of money laundering so that we can combat money laundering more effectively and efficiently.

This paper prevents a comprehensive description of, and comments on, various money‐laundering techniques and future efforts to be made in the fight against money laundering, which would be beneficial to policy makers, enforcement authorities, and judicial professionals.