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To discuss and interpret the recently published summary of the select priorities of the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (“OCIE”) in connection with the National Exam Program for 2015.

This article highlights the broad OCIE focus areas and provides detail on the associated initiatives.

OCIE’s priorities appear to place particular emphasis on retail investors and investors saving for retirement and market-wide risks, including cybersecurity. The examination priorities also emphasize OCIE’s evolving ability to analyze data to identify and examine registrants that may be engaged in illegal activity. Of particular interest to private equity fund sponsors, the National Exam Program will continue to conduct examinations that focus on fees and expenses borne by investors in private equity funds.

In view of the OCIE’s priorities, recent public comments by OCIE officials (concerning, for example, presentation of performance data) and our experience representing private equity firms being examined by OCIE, private equity fund sponsors should continue to be prepared for rigorous examinations on these issues and the areas of focus highlighted by the SEC in the past three years.

The article summarizes the OCIE’s recently published examination priorities for 2015 that cover a broad range of market participants and target a variety of their products, practices and procedures, including a continued focus on private equity fund sponsors.

Describe an important recent enforcement action by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding expense allocations by private equity funds.

Discusses a recent enforcement action by the SEC regarding a registered investment adviser’s handling of expense allocation with respect to two private fund clients and certain of their underlying portfolio companies.

The settlement and sanctions are noteworthy because: (i) there was no suggestion that the misallocations of expenses were designed to systematically favor one private fund client over the other, that the manager benefited from such misallocations, or that the failure to allocate expenses in accordance with the policy had been deliberate and (ii) while not stated explicitly, it appears likely that a significant portion of the disgorgement related to misallocations that occurred before the manager was a registered investment adviser.

Registered investment advisers should ensure that they and their portfolio companies have written policies in place designed to fairly allocate all expenses among all entities that benefit from the activities driving such expenses and that none of the sponsor’s clients are directly or indirectly benefited or harmed from allocation policies at the portfolio company level.

Description of a noteworthy SEC enforcement action regarding expense allocation and practical guidance from investment management lawyers to remind private equity sponsors to ensure that they have adopted and implemented expense allocation policies.

Many studies find that taxes influence capital location, income shifting, and capital structure decisions of multinational companies. So, reasonably estimating the marginal tax effect of international business decisions is important. However, simple marginal tax rate (MTR) proxies, such as a foreign country's top statutory rate or a rate that assumes remittance of all foreign profits as current dividends, fail to capture many tax law complexities. This article develops an algebraic “mixed remittance” model for calculating a U.S. company's MTR on its foreign subsidiary's profits. In contrast to the simpler proxies, the mixed remittance model allows foreign profits to be remitted in different forms (i.e. not just as dividends) and across varying time periods (i.e. not just the current period[t Also, the mixed remittance model considers withholding taxes, tax deferrals from postponed dividends, and foreign tax credit positions. Paired t-tests show that the resulting MTR measure often differs significantly from the two simpler MTR proxies.

The aim of this study is to investigate how the information needs satisfaction of visual art teachers affects their creativity. Visual art teachers’ information seeking behaviour and specifically the association of information needs satisfaction with creativity has been an understudied area, despite competent information seeking being considered essential for high quality practices of art teachers.

A questionnaire survey was developed addressing the information seeking behaviour of art teachers, informed by Wilson’s model (1981), including visual art teachers’ information needs, information resources, obstacles faced while seeking information and the perceived impact of information needs satisfaction on visual art teachers’ creativity.

The study included 298 visual art teachers in Greece. The results demonstrated that the key information needs of art teachers were mainly related to materials’ properties, techniques for creating artwork and artwork promotion methods. Online information sources were the preferred sources of art information, followed by colleagues, personal collections and visits to galleries and museums. Our study identified lack of time, lack of specialized libraries and copyright, as the main barriers to information seeking.

Information about art plays a substantial role in visual art education, while visual art teachers’ information needs satisfaction positively influences their creative endeavours. There is a need to further explore the digital information needs of visual art teachers.

Factors influencing crime location choices are not only significant to rape investigations, but they are especially important for geographic profiling. The purpose of the current study is to use temporal, hunting behavior, and modus operandi factors to determine those variables that influence the victim encounter and release locations in serial sexual crime.

Due to the possible correlated nature of serial rapes, the authors use generalized estimating equations (GEE) on a sample of 361 rapes committed by 72 serial sex offenders.

Results indicate that temporal factors, offender hunting behavior, and modus operandi strategies are significant predictors of both the victim encounter and release sites, but the importance of these factors varies depending on whether the location is in a residential land use area, a private site, inside location, or a site that is familiar to the offender.

Police can learn from the current findings and apply them to subsequent rapes within a series by recognizing the timing of the offense, the type of hunting pattern and attack method used in prior sexual crimes committed by the same offender, and modus operandi strategies, to determine the type of location where the rapist is likely to offend next.

This paper is the first attempt to predict factors related to both the encounter and the victim release site in serial rapes using GEE.

This article aims to identify and describe the research outcomes of studies that have employed the theoretical framework of lesson study (LS) in initial science teacher preparation programs. The focus is on the impact of LS on preservice teachers’ (PST) pedagogical and content knowledge, beliefs, routines and norms for professional learning and instructional practices.

A systematic approach was employed to compile pertinent literature by initially searching scholarly databases using specific keywords and phrases related to prospective science teacher preparation. Seventeen studies, encompassing both qualitative research and mixed-methods research, met the inclusion criteria and significantly contributed to the study’s findings. The authors independently conducted a coding process, applying a predefined code scheme based on Lewis et al.'s (2019) theoretical framework. The outcomes of the coding process were compared, and reliability tests were conducted to ensure the consistency of the coding.

In preservice science teacher (PSST) education, LS proves transformative, enriching pedagogical and content knowledge, shaping beliefs, fostering collaboration and influencing instructional practices. Its collaborative, reflective and iterative nature significantly contributes to the professional growth of preservice science teachers, preparing them for effective, student-centered teaching practices. Further investigation is warranted in the realm of LS, particularly concerning preservice science teachers and their beliefs.

This literature review on science PSTs is one of the pioneering efforts to employ the professional development framework crafted by Lewis et al. (2019).