This is a refereed, academic research annual, devoted to publishing articles about advancements in the development of accounting and its related disciplines from an international perspective. This serial examines how these developments affect the financial reporting and disclosure practices, taxation, management accounting practices, and auditing of multinational corporations, as well as their effect on the education of professional accountants worldwide.

Although many books have been published in the Soviet Union on the theory and practice of accounting in the United States, this is the first work to provide Americans with an analogous exchange of information. Ehiel Ash and Robert Strittmatter describe the details of accounting procedure for Soviet industrial enterprises as it exists in the USSR's managed socialist economy. The methodology of accounting is examined as a required first step in the evaluation of Soviet enterprise data, and the continuing interdependence of accounting, planning, statistics, and economic policies is also stressed.

Since accounting methodology is the only means in the Soviet Union for collecting, classifying, and summarizing economic information, Ash and Strittmatter characterize a firm grounding in Soviet theory and practice as essential for the examination of statistical data on the Soviet economy. They divide their work into three parts, covering the political and economic environment of Soviet enterprise management, accounting theory as the basis for creating accounting practice, and accounting for economic resources and processes in industrial enterprises. Among the topics discussed are control through accounting, and the Soviet government's use of it to direct industrial activity and the economic behavior of its people; and the influence of Marxist/Leninist philosophy on economic planning, market activity, and enterprise recordkeeping and financial reporting. This unique work will be a useful resource for students and professionals in the fields of accounting, Soviet studies, and international business, as well as a valuable addition to both public and academic libraries.

More now than ever before, auditing is in the spotlight; legislators, regulators, and top executives in all types of businesses realize the importance of auditors in the governance and performance equation. Previously routine and formulaic, internal auditing is now high-profile and high-pressure! Being an auditor in today's complex, highly regulated business environment involves more than crunching the numbers and balancing the books--it requires ensuring that appropriate checks and balances are in place to manage risk throughout the organization.

Designed to help auditors in any type of business develop the essential understanding, capabilities, and tools needed to prepare credible, defensible audit plans, Audit Planning: A Risk-Based Approach helps auditors plan the audit process so that it makes a dynamic contribution to better governance, robust risk management, and more reliable controls.

Invaluable to internal auditors facing new demands in the workplace, this book is also a "hands-on" reference for external auditors, compliance teams, financial controllers, consultants, executives, small business owners, and others charged with reviewing and validating corporate governance, risk management, and controls.

The second book in the new Practical Auditor Series, which helps auditors get down to business, Audit Planning: A Risk-Based Approach gives new auditors principles and methodologies they can apply effectively and helps experienced auditors enhance their skills for success in the rapidly changing business world.

With economic winter facing many healthcare and health education budgets, the high costs of medical education are bringing it under close scrutiny. However, the costs of not providing high quality medical education - not least human costs in morbidity and mortality from medical error - are also high, presenting medical educators, funding managers, policy makers and economists with an unenviable dilemma. To add to their difficulties, remarkably little has been written on cost effectiveness in medical education, including how to calculate costs, how to get maximal value for money and even what constitutes value for money. In this book, the first of its kind, world leading experts comprehensively outline what is known about cost effectiveness in each of their fields. Undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing professional education are all explored, as are e-learning, simulation, cost benefit analysis and numerous other areas. Lecturers and researchers in medical education, clinical tutors and educational supervisors and appraisers, managers responsible for funding medical education and health economists and health policy makers and shapers will find this an invaluable resource. 'An excellent analysis and explanation of an under-explored subject' - from the Foreword by Sir Liam Donaldson

This volume contains papers presented at the 1996 Center for International Education and Research in Accounting Conference. The theme of transitional and developing economies struggling with the introduction and implementation of international accounting standards is evident throughout the papers. While current events often seem to outstrip our ability to keep up, these papers provide insights into current events in the adoption and application of the international accounting standards.

Although the accounting standards regime has been tightened significantly in the 1990s, there are still a plethora of devices which can be used by businesses to show their performance in a better light. This book shows the potential for new schemes to evade the tougher rules. Illustrated with examples of corporate creativity, it demonstrates that despite the new regime, creative accounting is still possible. Ian Griffiths is the author of Creative Accounting.

Activity-based costing emerged as an important accounting concept in the mid-1980s in response to global competition. There is an urgent need to place it in perspective, so that both production and marketing managers know its advantages and its limitations. This book describes and explains where activity-based concepts fit in the cost and management accounting body of knowledge. It first shows the traditional framework of cost concepts, terminology, and techniques in order to demonstrate how the activity-based methods can bring about constructive changes in financial control systems. The major feature of the book is the three ABC models for manufacturing processes, marketing functions, and service industries. These models are based on the Institute of Management Accounting (IMA)-sponsored case studies of corporate divisions or branches that have already implemented ABC systems. The study was directed by Harvard professors, Cooper and Kaplan, and KPMG Peat Marwick. The book also includes illustrations of the most important cost analysis and control techniques that every successful operating manager must know.

If you're preparing for The American Institute of Professional Bookkeepers' (AIPB) bookkeeping certification test, you need an easy- to-follow test-preparation guide that gets you up to speed quickly in all of the bookkeeping basics, from setting up a company's books and recording transactions to managing employee payroll, handling government paperwork, and closing out the books. You need "Bookkeeping Workbook For Dummies."

With demonstration problems, complementary examples, and multiple-choice questions you'll find in this user-friendly primer, you'll sharpen your bookkeeping skills for the real world as you increase your ability to perform well on any test. Chapter quizzes let check your progress as you go, and step-by-step answers show you where you went wrong (or right) each problem. You'll feel your confidence --and competence--growing as you learn how to: Perform a wide variety of financial transactionsUse key concepts and skills with real-world bookkeeping problemsDesign a bookkeeping systemTrack day-to-day business operationsKeep journals for active accountsUse blank working papers and spread sheetsHandle cash entries and develop internal controlsCalculate and pay employee withholding taxesDepreciate assetsProve out your books at year's endPrepare tax returns as set up for a new year

Complete with Top Ten lists for managing cash, monitoring accounts, and finding additional helpful resources, "Bookkeeping Workbook For Dummies" is the test-prep guide you need to help you ace the certification test and speed your way into a successful and rewarding career.

Belkaoui offers a thorough examination of the various factors that affect the judgment/decision process in an accounting setting. As the author notes at the outset, an appreciation of the various influences on accounting decisionmaking is of critical importance to users, preparers, and verifiers of accounting information--particularly in an era of multinational corporations and global markets. In order to explain the judgment process in accounting, Belkaoui proposes a new theoretical model which assumes both that a cognitive process guides judgments and decisionmaking in accounting and that the schemata underlying this process are shaped by the crucial factors of national culture, language, organizational culture, and contractual agreements. The author examines each of these influences in turn, offering a comprehensive guide to the practitioner and researcher seeking empirical hypotheses to explain the judgment process in the international accounting arena.

The bulk of the volume is devoted to an in-depth examination of each of the five relativisms which affect the accounting judgment/decision process--cognitive, cultural, linguistic, organizational, and contractual. In each chapter, the author explores the theory and findings underlying these relativisms in the social sciences and their contribution to explaining the judgment/decision process in accounting. The final chapter synthesizes the preceding material and develops an international accounting theory based upon the judgment/decision model. Throughout, Belkaoui focuses on the complexity and richness of the judgment/decision process, cautioning that the evaluation of any accounting information must take into account the various critical influences on this process.

To make effective - and ultimately profitable - business decisions, executives and managers must be able to evaluate internal and external financial information. Accounting for Effective Decision Making is written in a style that cuts through the technical language and gets to the substance and implications of the most important financial and nonfinancial information. This useful guide to corporate financial and cost reporting for managers and executives at every level will enable them to anticipate and improve the effects of their decisions on the profitability of the enterprise and its business units.

Corporations must decide how much to invest in the natural capital (e.g., air, water, land, and forests) that they depend upon for their economic survival. How do they project the costs of essential investments under conditions of scientific and legislative uncertainty? An innovative roadmap is laid out with the help of a case study based on the actual experiences of a forestry company that made such an attempt. Everyone interested in developing a long-range environmental strategy will find this book instructive: senior corporate management, accountants, internal auditors, academics, students, and environmentalists. Based on the author's research for the United Nations, a new methodology is advanced to compute fuller costs. In addition to practical guidance on the theory and practice of calculating these costs, the author illustrates alternatives to traditional capital budgeting models. A whole range of concepts and applications are offered on natural capital; intergenerational equity; waste minimization; asset depletion rates; application of risk-management principles to costing natural capital; off-balance sheet natural assets; modern definition of profit for natural and business capital. Pioneering reporting methods for returns on investment and product costs are recommended in the concluding chapters.

With limited exceptions, present accounting rules do not address software accounting, and state and federal rules of taxing software remain ambiguous. Up-to-date, comprehensive, and written by the leading authority in this field, "Accounting and Tax Aspects of Computer Software Manufacturing" explains these rules for anyone involved with the tax or accounting aspects of software, including accountants, attorneys, and corporate executives.

Quality is becoming the most important competitive issue. The customer demands quality making it imperative to businesses to take it in serious consideration. It has become a matter of survival to provide a quality product. The concern with quality demands a) a better definition of the quality concept for each firm; b) a constant monitoring and planning of the quality standards and actions; and c) a continuous control of operations towards a quality objective. This is essentially the message and the content of this book: That quality needs to be defined contingent on the specific activities of the firm; that quality needs to be constantly monitored through a specific planning and recording system and finally, that quality is essentially the result of strong control activities. Belkaoui reviews the various approaches to the specification of the quality concept, the type of recording systems appropriate for its monitoring and the detailed control procedures needed to achieve it.

The book should be very helpful to executives involved in a total quality control program, management accountants involved in the control of quality and accounting students in managerial accounting courses.

This important new book explains how to use management auditing to determine the efficiency of public utility management systems. The first book to concentrate on such areas as evaluation criteria and audits of operations and personnel, Management Auditing as a Regulatory Tool identifies problems in the auditing process and recommends strategies for improving it. It is an essential guideline for public utility management, auditors, and consulting organizations. The book focuses on nine management audits of major New York state organizations.

Over the past two decades, there has been a paradigm shift in public administration and public sector accounting around the world, with increasing emphasis on good governance and accountability processes for government entities. This is all driven both by economic rationalism, and by changing expectations of what governments can and should do. An important aspect of this accountability and governance process is the establishment and effective functioning of a Public Accounts Committee (PAC), a key component of democratic accountability. With contributions from renowned scholars and practitioners, and using case studies from around the world, this research-based collection examines the rationales for current roles of the PACs and explores the links between PACs and National Audit Offices. It also compares PAC practices from developing and developed countries such as Africa, Asia, Pacific islands, and Europe with both Westminster and non-Westminster models of government. This will be valuable reading for academics, researchers, and advanced students in public management, public accounting and public sector governance.

For many entrepreneurs there is a mystique about finance -starting, growing and selling new ventures is tough enough. Yet with some focused financial knowledge you can run your company with less cash, grow it more quickly and make more money when it is sold. This book makes the dry world of finance easy to understand and relevant to entrepreneurs.

This book focuses on how American and non-American multinational companies can plan and manage their international business in the Gulf countries. Important issues of accounting, auditing, finance, taxation, marketing, and managerial issues are covered in each of the selected Gulf countries.

The leading professional accounting bodies in Britain today boast more than a quarter of a million qualified members and accountants are moving into top management positions in increasing numbers. Accountants have become the foremost professional grouping in British business management. The Priesthood of Industry documents the rise of the accountancy profession, from the handful of accountants listed in the trade directories of the major cities in the late-eighteenth century to the huge commercially-oriented firms of the late-twentieth century. The authors focus on the individual: the professional accountant, and adopt an economic determinist analysis to explain the rise of public practice and the transfer of staff to industry in increasing numbers. They also consider the routes through which this transfer of skills took place, and identify demand and supply side factors to explain the professional accountant's present hegemony in business management.