Audit Scheme Research Articles

Information Collecting and Dissemination in the Network of Taxpayers: Bayesian Approach

The current research is based on the assumption that the result of tax inspections is not only collection of taxes and fines. The information about audited taxpayers is also collected and helps to renew a priori knowledge of each agent's evasion propensity and obtain new a posteriori estimate of this propensity. In the beginning of the following tax period the fiscal authority can correct auditing strategy using updated information on every taxpayer. Each inspection is considered as a repeated game, in which the choice of agents to audit is associated with their revealed tendency to evade. Taxpayers also renew the information on the number of inspected neighbors using their social connections, represented by networks of various con gurations, and estimate the probability of auditing before the next tax period. Thus, the application of the Bayesian approach to the process of collecting and disseminating information in the network of taxpayers allows to optimize the audit scheme, reducing unnecessary expenses of tax authority and eventually increasing net tax revenue. To illustrate the application of the approach described above to the indicated problem, numerical simulation and scenario analysis were carried out.

Análisis del control gubernamental en las empresas productivas del Estado a raíz de la reforma energética en México de 2013

El presente estudio refiere al análisis de los cambios que conllevó la reforma energética de 2013 en materia de control gubernamental, dentro de los cuales se encuentra la nueva naturaleza de Pemex y la CFE como empresas productivas del Estado, adquiriendo un en-foque distinto en cuanto a sus ejes y actuaciones, lo que deriva en un nuevo esquema de vigilan-cia y auditoría, así como nuevos mecanismos de transparencia y rendición de cuentas. Dichos cambios trascendentales tienen la finalidad de fortalecer el sector energético y evitar la corrup-ción; sin embargo, no se han obtenido los objetivos planteados.

A Blockchain-Based Public Auditing Scheme for Cloud Storage Environment without Trusted Auditors

In the cloud storage applications, the cloud service provider (CSP) may delete or damage the user’s data. In order to avoid the responsibility, CSP will not actively inform the users after the data damage, which brings the loss to the user. Therefore, increasing research focuses on the public auditing technology recently. However, most of the current auditing schemes rely on the trusted third public auditor (TPA). Although the TPA brings the advantages of fairness and efficiency, it cannot get rid of the possibility of malicious auditors, because there is no fully trusted third party in the real world. As an emerging technology, blockchain technology can effectively solve the trust problem among multiple individuals, which is suitable to solve the security bottleneck in the TPA-based public auditing scheme. This paper proposed a public auditing scheme with the blockchain technology to resist the malicious auditors. In addition, through the experimental analysis, we demonstrate that our scheme is feasible and efficient.

Independent, Compulsory, and Centralized Verification of States’ Obligations in Fisheries: Can the IMO Audit Scheme for Shipping Law Be Used as an Example to Follow?

Abstract Marine fisheries are in crisis. One of the causes of this problem is the inability or unwillingness of some states to abide by the international rules binding them. No comprehensive and compulsory mechanism exists to review states’ compliance with these obligations. This is in stark contrast with the shipping field, where International Maritime Organization (IMO) member states are regularly audited: the respect of their obligations as flag, coastal, and port states is assessed by external and professional auditors through a detailed procedure. Transposing at least some features of the IMO Audit Scheme, such as comprehensiveness, regularity, predictability, and centralization to the review of compliance with fisheries-related obligations would be highly desirable. While there may be challenges ahead – in particular when it comes to a mandatory scheme – there does not appear to be insurmountable issues to developing a comprehensive audit in the fisheries field.

Decentralized data outsourcing auditing protocol based on blockchain

The rapid popularization of cloud computing and ultra-high-speed Internet has promoted the vigorous development of data sharing and collaborative office, especially in Big Data and AI. Aiming at protecting the security of users’ data, researchers developed PDP scheme to verify data. However, existing schemes all rely on semi-trusted Third Party Auditor (TPA) or group management to store verification information. In order to solve this problem, we propose a distributed data integrity audit scheme based on blockchain. This scheme provides a brand-new method, which allows customers to store data safely without relying on any specific TPA and protect users’ privacy at a lower cost. For the new concept, this paper points out the problems of the existing scheme and puts forward system model and security model. Then, a decentralized data integrity audit scheme using blockchain is designed. The proposed private PDP scheme based on blockchain is provably secure. At the same time, the security analysis and efficiency analysis show that the proposed PDP scheme is safe, efficient and practical.

Measuring the Economic Impact of a Voluntary Sustainable Tourism Certification

This article contributes to the debate about whether the investment in tourism sustainability is economically profitable for firms. Specifically, using cross-sectional analysis, we explore the existence of a causal link between the possession of a voluntary sustainable certification, Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS), and the increase in the prices of hotel accommodation. For this, the hedonic price method is used. Prior to the hedonic estimation, the propensity score-matching methodology is applied in order to control for self-selection bias. The analysis is carried out for coastal hotels located in the southern area of Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain) which merits attention as a typical mature sun and beach tourist destination. The study does not reveal any significant effects of sustainable certification on the prices of accommodations, which would appear to explain the low participation of establishments in the program. We conclude by providing some useful insights on measures aimed at improving related policies.

Environmental management certification and environmental performance: Greening or greenwashing?

AbstractThis article analyzes the contribution of certifiable environmental management standards—such as ISO 14001 and the Eco‐Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS)—to corporate environmental performance. Based on a content analysis of 414 third‐party‐verified environmental statements from EMAS‐registered Spanish organizations, which included information for around 6,700 detailed indicators, a weak improvement in environmental performance was found. Less than half of the analyzed indicators—namely, 48.27%—revealed a net improvement. Similarly, analysis of the justifications of the registered companies for the lack of improvement points to a rather symbolical adoption of the certification, intended to do only the bare minimum. These findings call into question the prevailing opinion about the positive impact of voluntary certifiable environmental management standards on environmental greening. Implications for managers and public policy makers, as well as for other stakeholders, are discussed.

Dynamic Outsourced Auditing Services for Cloud Storage Based on Batch-Leaves-Authenticated Merkle Hash Tree

Cloud computing encourages users to outsource their data to cloud storage. Data outsourcing means that users lose physical autonomy on their own data, which makes remote data integrity verification become a critical challenge for potential cloud users. To free user from the burden incurred by frequent integrity verifications, Third Party Auditor (TPA) is introduced to perform verifications on behalf of user for data integrity assurance. However, existing public auditing schemes rely on the assumption that TPA is trusted, thus these schemes cannot be directly extended to support the outsourced auditing model, where TPA might be dishonest and any two of the three involved entities (i.e. user, TPA, and cloud service provider) might be in collusion. In this paper, we propose a dynamic outsourced auditing scheme which cannot only protect against any dishonest entity and collision, but also support verifiable dynamic updates to outsourced data. We present a new approach, based on batch-leaves-authenticated Merkle Hash Tree (MHT), to batch-verify multiple leaf nodes and their own indexes all together, which is more appropriate for the dynamic outsourced auditing system than traditional MHT-based dynamism approaches that can only verify many leaf nodes one by one. Experimental results show that our solution minimizes the costs of initialization for both user and TPA (compared to existing static outsourced auditing scheme), and incurs a lower price of dynamism at user side.

The use of eco-efficiency indicators by environmental frontrunner companies

Eco-efficiency is considered as a relevant practice for corporate sustainability as this concept addresses both environmental and economic issues. Similarly, eco-efficient indicators are seen as useful instrument for corporate environmental management. The literature has studied the use of eco-efficient indicators by companies from different sectors of activity but the analysis of the use of eco-efficient indicators by environmental frontrunner companies from diverse sectors of activity has been overlooked. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to contribute to the literature analysing the use of eco-efficient indicators by environmental frontrunner companies. For that purpose the case of companies registered against the Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) is analysed, as the adoption of this scheme is associated to environmental frontrunner companies in both practitioner and scholarly literatures. Based on a content analysis of third-party verified environmental statements of 387 EMAS-registered Spanish organizations, a general lack of use of eco-efficient indicators was found. More specifically, the results show that only close to 39% of the 10,337 analysed indicators were calculated with minimum eco-efficiency criteria to measure corporate environmental performance. Implications for managers, public policy makers as well as other stakeholders are discussed.

Cloud storage data integrity audit based on an index–stub table

With the development of cloud computing technology, more individuals and organizations have chosen cloud services to store and maintain their data and reduce the burden on local storage and corresponding maintenance costs. However, although the cloud computing infrastructure is more powerful and reliable than personal computing devices, the cloud storage server is not completely trusted due to various internal and external threats;therefore, users need to regularly check whether their data stored in the cloud server are intact. Therefore, in recent years, researchers have proposed a variety of schemes for data integrity auditing in cloud storage. Among them, in a part of public auditing schemes for cloud storage based on homomorphic authenticators, random sampling of data blocks, and random masking techniques, users need to store and maintain a two-dimensional(2 D) table related to the index information of data blocks in the file. When a user’s outsource data need to be frequently updated to avoid forgery attacks due to the similar index value of data block being reused, the design and maintenance of the 2 D table become cumbersome. In this study, to solve the abovementioned problem, an index–stub table structure was first proposed, which is simple and easy to maintain. On the basis of this structure, a thirdparty auditor auditing scheme with a privacy-preserving property was proposed for cloud storage. This scheme can effectively support various remote dynamic operations for outsource data at the block level. Then, a formal security proof for data integrity guarantee provided by the scheme was given under the random oracle model. A formal security analysis was also given for the privacy-preserving property of the audit protocol. Finally, the performance of the scheme was theoretically analyzed and compared with relevant experiments. Results indicate that the scheme has high efficiency.

Developing and implementing a protocol for bilateral trade agreements: the Philippines' shift to a risk assessment policy and meeting its challenges.

The livestock and poultry industries in the Philippines have been continuously growing for the past six years, as reflected in the Philippine Statistics Authority annual reports from 2013 to 2018. To augment supplies and ensure food sufficiency, as well as to fulfil trade agreements, the government has adopted a policy of importing some livestock commodities. Currently, the Philippines imports about 20% of its total meat requirements, and this figure is expected to increase over the next few years. Private traders and companies could import buffalo meat without restriction until 1996, when the Department of Agriculture (DA) intervened by sending inspection missions to exporting countries due to the concerns of the livestock industry about the foot and mouth disease challenges during that time. But, at that point, there were still no clear rules, regulations or standards governing the importation of meat and meat products into the Philippines. By 2003, as outbreaks of transboundary animal diseases were occurring in the region (avian influenza as well as foot and mouth disease), the government saw the need to protect its borders from the entry, establishment and spread of animal diseases. Measures were needed to prevent the introduction of disease-carrying, contaminated or adulterated meat and meat products that could endanger the lives and health of Filipino consumers and, consequently, have potentially serious economic impacts on the livestock industry and other allied industries. As more and more requests were received to import meat and meat products, and as various stakeholder groups began to question why increasing numbers of imports were being allowed into the country, the DA began to shift to a risk-based policy rather than a policy of 100% inspection. The Philippine Government ensured that there was a legal basis as well as a scientific basis for orders governing the importation of meat and live animals. As the country shifts to a risk-based policy, making the public understand why it is implementing this policy remains a major challenge. Other areas that need to be developed and strengthened include quarantine and border security procedures, certification programmes, identification and traceability, export procedures, periodic auditing schemes, animal health programmes, capacities for risk analysis, and provincial border controls, which can be set by local governments to allow provinces to protect their locality.

Efficient audit protocol supporting virtual nodes in cloud storage

AbstractWith ten years of development, cloud computing has been widely used in more and more field. As a part of cloud computing, cloud storage has earned more and more attentions. It becomes a new trend that users employ cloud storage to outsource their data. Instead of the traditional approach to store data in a local server, users' data cannot be controlled once data outsourcing in cloud storage. At the same time, as the cloud service provider is honest‐but‐curious, it becomes a challenge to make sure that cloud service provider can provide storage service with high quantity. In this paper, we focus on the issue of cloud storage security audit. In particular, we propose a novel public audit scheme, which employs chameleon authentication tree in the third‐party audit model to significantly reduce the huge computation cost of data dynamic operation. Meanwhile, our scheme can effectively prevent the fraud of dishonest cloud service provider, with supporting dynamic data update and batch audit. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme is more secure and efficient compared with the existing schemes.

Who cares?—Stakeholder relevance for voluntary environmental management in hospitals

AbstractThe voluntary implementation of environmental management systems (EMS) according to Eco‐Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) is a proactive and comprehensive management initiative aiming to improve corporate environmental performance. EMS implementation and connected communication activities are seen as a possibility to strengthen stakeholder relationships. However, EMS development and implementation consumes significant time and financial resources. Therefore, in this empirical study with hospital managers, it is questioned if and to what extent hospital managers perceive stakeholders valuing the implementation of an EMS according to EMAS. The results show that only internal stakeholder pressure from owners and the management board exists. Other stakeholders know little and care less about EMAS, suggesting that they have other priorities and do not see a necessity for hospitals to engage in environmental management efforts. This low stakeholder interest reduces the value of EMAS registration for hospitals and limits future environmental management efforts. This could hinder sustainable development within the healthcare sector.

Efficient Auditing Scheme for Secure Data Storage in Fog-to-Cloud Computing

Fog-to-cloud computing has now become a new cutting-edge technique along with the rapid popularity of Internet of Things (IoT). Unlike traditional cloud computing, fog-to-cloud computing needs more entities to participate in, including mobile sinks and fog nodes except for cloud service provider (CSP). Hence, the integrity auditing in fog-to-cloud storage will also be different from that of traditional cloud storage. In the recent work of Tian et al., they took the first step to design public auditing system for fog-to-cloud computing. However, their scheme becomes very inefficient since they uses intricate public key cryptographic techniques, including bilinear mapping, proof of knowledge etc. In this paper, we design a general and more efficient auditing system based on MAC and HMAC, both of which are popular private key cryptographic techniques. By implementing MAC and HMAC, we give a concrete instantiation of our auditing system. Finally, the theoretical analysis and experiment results show that our proposed system has more efficiency in terms of communication and computational costs.

Carbon-neutral medical conferences should be the norm

Carbon-neutral medical conferences should be the norm

A novel transparent and auditable fog-assisted cloud storage with compensation mechanism

This paper introduces a new fog-assisted cloud storage which can achieve much higher throughput compared to the traditional cloud-only storage architecture by reducing the traffics toward the cloud storage. The fog-storage service providers are transparency to end-users and therefore, no modification on the end-user devices is necessary. This new system is featured with (1) a stronger audit scheme which is naturally coupled with the proposed architecture and does not suffer from the replay attack and (2) a transparent and efficient compensation mechanism for the fog-storage service providers. We provide rigorous theoretical analysis on the correctness and soundness of the proposed system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to discuss about a storage data audit scheme for fog-assisted cloud storage as well as the compensation mechanism for the service providers of the fog-storage service providers.

External communication on legal compliance by Italian waste treatment companies

Numerous studies discuss the role of environmental reporting to communicate legislative compliance, but few papers focus on the waste treatment sector, where clear communication is crucial for companies to legitimize management strategies. To fill this gap, an explorative study focusing on solid waste treatment by Italian companies registered with the European Environmental Management and Audit Scheme was conducted. The aim of the research is to discover if and how these companies inform external stakeholders about compliance with environmental legislation in (1) assessing environmental aspects, (2) planning environmental objectives, and (3) monitoring environmental performance. Forty-nine Italian companies were selected, and their Environmental Statements were analyzed. The results prove that environmental reporting of Italian companies frequently includes an explicit reference to legislative compliance in planning environmental objectives; however, rarely legal compliance is assumed as criterion to assess environmental aspects and to monitor environmental performance. Comparing these results with other recent studies, some conflicting findings emerge: the risks derived by the lack of explicit information on legal compliance in environmental reporting are discussed, and recommendations to assure transparency and credibility of reporting are underlined. Final propositions and future perspectives for practitioners and scientists conclude the paper, which contributes to the debate about the adequacy of external communication of environmental management systems in waste treatment sector.

Identity-Based Public Auditing Scheme for Cloud Storage with Strong Key-Exposure Resilience

Secured storage system is a critical component in cloud computing. Cloud clients use cloud auditing schemes to verify the integrity of data stored in the cloud. But with the exposure of the auditing secret key to the Cloud Service Provider, cloud auditing becomes unsuccessful, however strong the auditing schemes may be. Therefore, it is essential to prevent the exposure of auditing secret keys, and even if it happens, it is necessary to minimize the damage caused. The existing cloud auditing schemes that are strongly resilient to key exposure are based on Public Key Infrastructure and so have challenges of certificate management/verification. These schemes also incur high computation time during integrity verification of the data blocks. The Identity-based schemes eliminate the usage of certificates but limit the damage due to key exposure, only in time periods earlier to the time period of the exposed key. Some of the key exposure resilient schemes do not provide support for batch auditing. In this paper, an Identity-based Provable Data Possession scheme is proposed. It protects the security of Identity-based cloud storage auditing in time periods both earlier and later to the time period of the exposed key. It also provides support for batch auditing. Analysis shows that the proposed scheme is resistant to the replace attack of the Cloud Service Provider, preserves the data privacy against the Third Party Auditor, and can efficiently verify the correctness of data.

The EMAS Registration of the Livenza Furniture District in the Province of Pordenone (Italy)

One of the most important manufacturing areas of the Friuli Venezia Giulia region is the territory close to Pordenone, the Livenza furniture district. This industrial district, consisting of industries of wood, wood and cork products, furniture, straw articles, and weave materials, located in 11 municipalities of that area, was the first Italian district to obtain the Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) Registration in 2006. Data and information from a questionnaire compiled by more than 100 firms and 11 municipalities of the district were used to draw up the territorial environmental analysis (TEA). For the EMAS registration renewal, obtained in 2016, the TEA was updated by reviewing the methodology of the environmental impact evaluation: the ecological footprint (EF) was compared with the carrying capacity (CC) of that area. The results put in light that the EF was greater than the CC. Several actions for reducing the environmental impacts of the district activities were highlighted.

An Efficient Public Auditing Scheme for Cloud Storage with Secure Access Control and Resistance Against DOS Attack by Iniquitous TPA

Cloud storage is a cloud based service which delivers scalable on demand on line storage of data and eliminates the need of maintaining local data centre. Storage of data in cloud brings many advantages such as lower-cost, metered service, scalable and ubiquitous access. However, it also raises concerns to its integrity; to save the storage space cloud service provider may delete some rarely access data. Data privacy is another issue which must be addressed to increase data owner’s trust. To address above issues, many researchers have proposed public auditing schemes to validate the integrity of data using third party auditor. These schemes generate metadata using data files on the owner side and store these metadata on the cloud storage along with the file data, which helps in auditing. These schemes address many concerns which arise due to remote data storage. However, computation cost involved for metadata generation at the data owner side is not properly addressed; another issue which is not properly addressed is an iniquitous third party auditor may be the source of denial of service attack by issuing constantly large number of audit request. Our scheme solves these issues by lowering the computation cost at data owner side and controlling the number of times a third party auditor can issue an audit request to the cloud storage. Our Scheme also supports secure access of data using conditional proxy re-encryption scheme and delegation of auditing task by the authorized third party auditor to another auditor for the specified period of times in the case of unavailability of authorized third party auditor.