فصلنامه بررسی های حسابداری و حسابرسی
پیاپی 109 (پاییز 1401)

This research seeks to investigate whether credit trade can decrease cost stickness (as a signal of opportunistic behavior of manager) or not? and whether agency problem, product market competition and customer concentration can moderate the effect of trade credit on cost stickness or not?

Trade credit is measured by two ratios: accounts payable to cost of good sold ratio and accounts payable to sale ratio. Cost stickness is measures by selling, general and administrative expense stickness (SGA) and cost of goods sold stickness(CGS). The statistical population consists of the firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange between 2014 to 2020.

Credit trade affects negatively on cost stickiness and this effect is prevalent in the firms with more agency problems and active in less competitive market.

According to obtained findings, using credit trade leads to decrease the opportunistic behavior of managers and cost stickiness and so, it is a monitoring tool that can be used in evaluating performance and expense efficiency of firms. Additionally, in the firms suffer from more agency problems or active in less competitive market, trade credit decreases cost stickness more because suppliers monitor these firms more than others in order to maintain their interest.

Previous studies have proved the significant role of cognitive characteristics and personality traits in making judgments and decisions. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the impact of the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) of auditors, as a cognitive characteristic, on their audit quality.

In this study, in order to investigate and analyze the hypothesis, the data related to the IQ of 41 Certified Public Accountants (CPA) of the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) were extracted. These accountants were the first signatories of the audit report of 204 companies listed on the body in the fiscal year of 1398 (started on March 21, 2018). To collect the required data about the IQ variable (the questionnaire), the Raven`s Progressive Matrices (RPM) test was used. To assess the other variable, i.e. the quality of the audit, the type of auditors’ reports were used as a benchmark. Logistic Regression was also used to test the study hypothesis.

After conducting the statistical analysis and estimating the Logistic Regression, the positive and significant impact of the IQ of the auditors on the quality of the audit was confirmed, regarding the coefficient of the independent variable, i.e. IQ, which stood at 1998/0. Also, the coefficient of determination (R²), which is the same as the McFadden R-squared, stood at 0.163, proving that 16% of the changes in the dependent variable could be explained by the independent logistic Regression variable.

According to the findings o the present study, the auditors’ IQ as a cognitive characteristic and personality trait has a positive effect on their decision-making and judgments throughout the entire audit process. The obtained results suggest that the auditors’ IQ bears a significant and direct relationship with the quality of the audit. It can be concluded that the higher the auditors’ IQ is, the higher the quality of the audit would be; therefore, auditors with higher IQ levels, make better judgments with higher audit quality. Accordingly, IQ as one of the cognitive abilities of auditors has an important role in decision-making during the audit process and in improving the audit quality. This study showed that despite various mechanisms aimed at standardizing audit quality, the auditors’ intellectual ability is still important for the quality of audit services provided to the clients. These findings may be interesting to those who decide on mechanisms to control and regulate the quality of audit services. This study showed that the cognitive characteristics of the auditors, as a unit of analysis, play an effective role in audit quality.

Organizations seek to adapt to their environment through mechanisms that help them achieve their goals. Internal control provides reasonable assurance of an organization's goals. Implementation of internal control affects its conduct and the number of weaknesses identified in the evaluation of the system. Therefore the purpose of this study is to identify factors influencing the internal control system deployment.

This research is qualitative and was done using the Multi-Grounded Theory. Therefore, the data was analyzed using experimental and theoretical grounding. Experimental data was obtained from theoretical sampling; 13 semi-structured interviews were conducted with experts with successful experiences in implementing the internal control system from the Iranian calendar year of 2019 to 2020. The theoretical data was derived from reviewing the extant literature.

The results of this study showed that inefficiency and effectiveness of procedures, lack of proper segregation of duties, and lack of proper documentation of procedures make deployment inevitable. It was also proved that the implementation process is influenced by audit quality, organizational structure, quality of computer systems, management characteristics, and the quality of the knowledge of the group responsible for the establishment, quality of the board, and external rules.

By building trust, training, proper scheduling, continuous monitoring, system recognition, and identifying the needs of the organization, the internal control system can be established according to the size of the company, industry type, time constraints, management support, and employee support.

Despite the significance of the issue of financial indiscipline, few scientific studies have investigated the motivational, voluntary, emotional, and cognitive factors affecting the actions of managers and employees within organizations. Financial discipline in an organization is influenced by organizational and environmental factors and the present study seeks to study the impact of organizational factors on such concepts.

This study is an applied and mixed methods exploratory study.  In its qualitative part, the conceptual model of the research was extracted by extensively reviewing the extant literature. The localization and theoretical saturation of the research model were then done by conducting in-depth interviews and applying the thematic analysis method The statistical population in the qualitative part of this study included experts in public finance who were selected using a targeted sampling strategy and theoretical sampling method. In the quantitative section, based on the data collected by the questionnaire and operationalization of the research model, the fit goodness of the research model was determined using the structural equation modeling (SEM). The statistical population included the managers of the auditing organization, the Iranian Association of Certified Public Accountants, and the General Inspection Organization of Iran (GIO). The questionnaire was distributed electronically and 93 usable questionnaires were collected.

Model fitting proved that the components of financial and credit resources, structure, and management style have a direct and significant effect on financial discipline. Also, the greatest impact on financial discipline was made by the indicators of receiving credits in a regular and scheduled manner, the absence of financial restrictions, the quality of management controls, the existence of written and detailed job descriptions, process reforms, and seriousness in dealing with violations.

Financial discipline is a manageable phenomenon through some organizational factors, namely financial and credit resources, organizational structure, and management style. In financial and credit resources, regular receipt of credits reduces the need to provide resources in various ways, alleviates the problem of excess or deficit of funds, thus preventing the transfer of program credits, and ultimately reduces indiscipline. One of the salient features of an efficient management control system is its ability to maintain present and future controls. These capabilities reduce the likelihood of financial indiscipline by anticipating and detecting it in a timely manner. Establishing an effective system of internal controls reduces the risk of financial irregularities. The existence of transparent processes and procedures increases the level of financial discipline of organizations by reducing the ambiguity in their process of providing services as well as their ability to monitor the budget. Finally, seriousness in dealing with violations strengthens financial discipline by increasing the cost of committing violations.

Recent research shows that expenses and assets change much less when income decreases than they do when income increases. Assets and expenses which behave in this manner are referred to as "sticky". In other words, when the income increases, an increase in variable costs and assets in a certain ratio is expected, however, the concept of stickiness implies that with any decrease in income, the amount of reduction in costs and related assets should be less than the number of their changes when incomes increase. In light of Iran's specific economic conditions, this study explores whether inventory stickiness exists in the manufacturing and trading companies and whether changes in inventory (decreases) during income reductions are equal to changes in inventory (increases) during income increases; a question not previously addressed by Iranian researchers.

This study employed the panel data approach to testing the hypotheses, and the model of Anderson et al. (2003) was used to measure inventory stickiness. After applying certain restrictions, the statistical sample consisted of 5,924 firm years from 2006 to 2021.

The results indicated that Iranian companies experience inventory stickiness, and this phenomenon is most notable in the automotive, rubber, plastic, and pharmaceutical industries.

Various studies have considered and tested the stickiness phenomenon, particularly in the case of costs, including the study by Anderson et al. (2003) as well as others applying their presented model. The majority of them have documented the stickiness of costs. Recent research has sought to explain the underlying causes of this phenomenon. A company's inventories are one of its current assets, which are used to generate income in future periods. They are sometimes manufactured to meet unpredictable needs, as well as other reasons, including a lack of agility in adjusting production volume according to demand, excessive costs associated with reducing outputs, shutting down production lines (dismantling costs), and forecasting an increase in production by management.  It is expected that inventories exhibit a sticky behavior. Thus, their changes (decreases) in response to a decrease in income should be less than their changes (increases) in response to an increase in income. This is reasonable in some cases, particularly in countries facing acute inflation and in companies that rely heavily on imports for their raw material supply. According to the complexities of different industries and the different economic considerations they have in supplying materials and goods, companies adopt different strategies for maintaining inventories. In order to cope with economic fluctuations, managers should consider inventory stickiness as part of their policies. Several studies can be conducted to examine the factors and conditions affecting this phenomenon.

Data mining is an effective tool to improve and enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of tax processes by extracting beneficial knowledge and insight from tax data. The purpose of this paper is to study the status of research pieces in the field, classify them, identify the research gaps and provide a roadmap for researchers and practitioners through a systematic literature review.

Due to the importance of the subject, this study focuses on studies conducted in the field of data mining and taxation from 2000 to 2021. It investigates their processes and practical domains. The reviewed studies were categorized based on the proposed framework and various analyses were presented in terms of processes, practical domains, and data mining techniques. Furthermore, the distribution of papers according to the year of their publication and also regarding the journal in which they were published were presented. Tax processes were divided into four groups i.e. submission, examination, collection, and taxpayer services. The defined practical domains included tax payment, tax refund, shell corporation identification, identification of non-filer taxpayers, risk-based tax audit selection, tax debt management, and tax comments analysis. The classification framework for data mining techniques in this study was defined as clustering, association analysis, classification and prediction, regression, time series, anomaly detection, and visualization.

According to the obtained findings, most of the reviewed studies were assigned to the inspection process, 94 percent of which worked on the practical domain of “risk-based tax audit selection”. The most popular and widely used technique was "classification and prediction", while the three algorithms including neural network, decision tree, and support vector machine were widely used, compared to other algorithms.

Currently, tax administrations have huge databases and traditional methods and tools cannot analyze them due to the limited resources of organizations as well as the large amounts of available data. Data mining can have an effective performance on various tax processes and can be effective in making decisions and adopting appropriate approaches. There is good potential for the application of data mining techniques in all of the proposed practical domains. In the submission and collection processes, more research needs to be done. Some approaches including reinforcement learning, deep learning, graph analysis, and big data analytics are recommended for future research. Proposing practical frameworks for using data mining techniques in tax systems and tax administrations is also recommended. To the best of the author's knowledge, no study has been conducted to investigate the issue, while there is a definite need in this regard. Besides, one of the important issues, which needs to be addressed as the main gap in this field, is integrating the internal and external sources of data, which can improve effectiveness.

An important part of the needs of stakeholders in the capital market is the disclosure of information, which ensures that their interests are protected against corporate aggression. Therefore, the supervisory institutions in the capital market try to control the consequences of companies' opportunism through the development of corporate accounting and by regulating the laws and restricting the financial performance of companies. The purpose of this study is to design a forensic accounting model for capital market companies.

This is a developmental, mixed-method study. Interviews were used to collect data in the qualitative part. In its quantitative part, matrix checklists were used based on a pairwise Comparison. The participants included 13 academic specialists who were considered experts, both scientifically and empirically. Theoretical sampling and snowball sampling were used. In the quantitative part, the target population included 20 financial managers from stock companies and official judicial experts, who were selected by homogeneous sampling based on their professional experience and level of technical and specialized knowledge.

The achieved results in the qualitative part led to three categories; six components and 39 conceptual themes which were presented in the form of a hexagonal model. The model was obtained during three stages of coding in the theoretical analysis of the foundation data. The results in the quantitative section also showed that the component of institutional oversight is the most effective component in the development of forensic accounting.

According to the obtained results, institutional oversight of the corporate governance structure contributes significantly to the field of forensic accounting in order to reduce the legal and forensic burden of financial operations.