Local Peer Research Articles

A participant observation study of the resolution of audit engagement challenges in government tax compliance audits

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to extend the prior auditing literature by examining audit engagement challenges arising during government tax compliance audits. The prior auditing literature has examined how audit engagement challenges have been resolved through auditor/auditee negotiations. Design/methodology/approach – The empirical evidence for the paper was gathered during a participant observation study conducted by the primary researcher over a period of six years while working as an auditor for the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) of the US Department of Treasury. Findings – This paper discusses various challenges faced by government auditors and how these challenges were resolved. The path to resolution was not always clearly marked. Resolution depended a great deal on the individual auditor’s judgment, interpretation of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFRs), and the willingness of the auditee to change the methods and techniques they use in operating and reporting wine operations. Materiality was determined by compliance with the regulation criteria [CFRs and the US Code (USC)] – any non-compliance was considered to be material. Resolution of many of the challenges resulted in an increased payments of excise taxes or penalties by the auditee entities. In other cases, the audit agency allowed the auditees to agree to change or amend their practices to correct a violation or a lack of compliance with US federal government regulations. As such, while the difference in the role and status of the government tax compliance auditor as compared with the independent external auditor did not necessarily lead to a different set of audit procedures, the pattern of communications between the auditor and the auditee in a government tax compliance audit were quite different from an external audit of financial statements. The government tax compliance environment is often complex, but the auditor may draw on a number of sources of knowledge and communication: CFRs, USC, Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards, national audit planning, national experts, winery management, local peers, local government supervision, legal counsel and other auditors. Originality/value – The primary contribution of the paper lies in the fact that little or no prior research in auditing has been conducted using participant observation as a research methodology. The use of participant observation provides new perspectives on the resolution of audit engagement challenges and auditor/auditee communication and negotiation.

The pragmatic use of evidence to inform breastfeeding peer support guidance for Scotland

BackgroundBreastfeeding is of great importance to public health because of indisputable evidence about its benefits to the health of mothers, their infants, and children; however Scotland struggles to view breastfeeding as a normal activity. Nonetheless, mother-to-mother (peer) breastfeeding support is popular. In response to the Scottish Government's 2011 document Improving Maternal and Infant Nutrition: A Framework for Action, we have produced guidance for professionals in health boards and voluntary sector agencies that is informed by the evidence about breastfeeding peer support. MethodsWith the agreement of policy makers, health professionals, and voluntary sector agencies, we searched CINAHL, MIDIRS, and BNI databases for systematic reviews published in English between Jan 1, 1985, and Feb 1, 2013, using the keywords “peer support”, “infant feeding”, or “breastfeeding”. We identified eight systematic reviews about the effectiveness of breastfeeding peer support. Acknowledging that gaps remained in the evidence about the delivery of breastfeeding peer support, we considered plausible theory and ten ethical principles (do good, do not harm, equity, respect, empowerment, sustainability, social responsibility, participation, openness, and accountability) to help guide decision making about provision of local breastfeeding peer support. We conducted a Health Inequalities Impact Assessment (HIIA) to identify how breastfeeding peer support might differentially affect those protected by the 2010 Equality Act. FindingsAlthough the breastfeeding peer support guidance was informed by systematic review level evidence, we also needed to address issues for which we lacked such evidence. Thus, the presentation of the current national and international policy context, summaries of relevant randomised controlled trials, and definitions of breastfeeding peer support, contributed to the guidance. The integration of the HIIA findings that were cross-referenced with the consideration of ethical principles provided a template of how health boards and voluntary sector agencies might conduct their own HIIA and apply ethical decision making in response to local breastfeeding peer support issues. InterpretationAdopting this pragmatic approach has enabled meaningful engagement that takes account of professional experience. This approach has helped produce guidance that is realistic in aiming to change and enhance current breastfeeding practice in Scotland. FundingNone.

The review process of the National Health Promotion Policy: simultaneous multiple movements

Public policy can be understood as the translation of government proposals and the aspirations of society. Driven by the advances and challenges of social transformation, the need for the coordination of agendas and limited social participation in the drafting of the 2006 National Health Promotion Policy (PNPS), the Ministry of Health and the Thematic Group on Health Promotion/Abrasco proposed the PNPS review. This article describes the steps in that process. It involves policy analysis conducted by literature review and document analysis from the "internal triangulation" standpoint. The revision process adopted multiple approaches on data gathering (Regional Workshops and Health Councils, Intra/Intersectorial Delphi and Electronic Questionnaire). It also used heterogeneous sources of information, different local contexts (five regions of Brazil) and peer validation. The results were systematically ordered with the aid of an analytical matrix organized by objectives, principles, guidelines, themes and actions, resulting in a draft of the new PNPS. Lastly, a national seminar was organized in which the results of the process and a synthesis of the revised text were presented, making it possible to identify process gains and the next steps for the actors involved with the new PNPS.

Exploring new avenues to assess the sharp end of patient safety: an analysis of nationally aggregated peer review data

BackgroundMany healthcare organisations (HCOs) use peer review to evaluate clinical performance, but it is unclear whether these data provide useful insights for assessing the sharp end of patient safety.ObjectiveTo describe...

Contagious Negative Sentiment and Corporate Policies: Evidence from Local Bankruptcy Filings

This study shows that corporate bankruptcy events affect the investment and financing policies of geographically proximate firms. Following the bankruptcy of a local peer, non-filing local firms significantly reduce investment expenditures, reduce capital structure leverage, and hold more cash. The effects of local bankruptcy are more pronounced when the CEO of the filing firm is dismissed, and stronger among firms managed by CEOs who are relatively young, have fewer qualifications, and relatively short tenure. Firms that have board connections with the bankrupt firms also react more strongly to the distress events. Importantly, the spillover effects associated with geographic proximity cannot be explained by intra-industry or supply chain effects documented in the extant literature. We also find that the effects cannot be explained by shocks to the local economy. Collectively, these results suggest that corporate managers follow the availability heuristic and become overly conservative in their investment and financial policies in response to local distress events.

Sound Advice for ABR Analysis

Sound Advice for ABR Analysis

The Environment and Support Needs of Japanese Families on Temporary Work Assignments in the United States.

This study aimed to describe the environment and the family support needs of families of Japanese nationals rearing children who are temporarily working in the Southwestern United States. Mixed methods were utilized based on the Concentric Sphere Family Environment Model. Data collection occurred over 132 days, with 25 families participating in formal interviews and 40 families completing a written questionnaire survey. "Mutual support from relatives and friends in Japan, and with local Japanese peers," and other themes, six in all, were extracted. Japanese families require intervention for measures related to the global environment in their daily lives. The common factor for those families with high intervention needs was the inability to access family external resources that were usually available in Japan. The building of peer support and intervention to promote their participation in the community are necessary.

Navigating the cultural transition alone: Psychosocial adjustment of Korean early study abroad students.

Precollege study abroad in English-speaking countries is an increasingly popular educational strategy among Asian families. We used grounded theory method to construct a model of cultural adjustment process for unaccompanied minors based the retrospective narratives of 10 (8 male) South Korean adolescents who came to the United States, unaccompanied by parents, to attend middle schools or high schools. We found that unaccompanied minors' cultural adjustment progressed from their predeparture ambivalence to initial sense of vulnerability to an eventual sense of reengagement. Unaccompanied minor students' pervasive sense of vulnerability upon arrival was heightened not only by their lack of English fluency but also their reluctance to seek the support of parents in Korea and of local Korean peers. This study has implications for educators and counselors in secondary schools who work with international students who are unaccompanied minors.

Extended Peer Evaluation of an Analytical Deliberative Decision Support Procedure in Environmental Health Practice

How can we assess the quality of an analytical deliberative decision support procedure in environmental health practice? Objectifying quality criteria is difficult for several reasons. Opening up evaluation to a diversity of critics is one approach to take into account different actor perspectives and complexity. We describe how social scientists organized extended peer evaluation of a participatory multi-criteria procedure that was applied in Flemish environmental health practice. International peer review was combined with local extended peer evaluation. Social scientists collaborated closely with natural scientists and policy representatives in designing several evaluative activities and in interpreting the results.We discuss how these different perspectives came to reach conclusions, with a special focus on methodological decision-making. A process of learning by doing and negotiating, finding a methodological path amidst practicalities, complexity and ambition.

PANDAS: Helping families in need

Having been unable to locate local peer support when she suffered perinatal depression, Rachael Dobson and her husband Stuart decided to set up a charity so that others would have someone to turn to in their time of need.

Improving BGP Protocol to Advertise Multiple Routes for the Same Destination Prefix

An Internet autonomous system (AS) uses BGP policies in order to meet its local objectives (e.g. optimal routing within AS) and peering contracts with neighboring ASes (e.g. advertising some specific routes to a neighbor, forwarding traffic over specific paths, etc.) In this paper we propose an enhancement of BGP route selection and advertisement processes, and demonstrate how the enhanced BGP can be used to flexibly implement diverse policies, regardless of the network topology, that were not feasible before.

Northern Territory Heart Failure Initiative–Clinical Audit (NTHFI–CA)–a prospective database on the quality of care and outcomes for acute decompensated heart failure admission in the Northern Territory: study design and rationale

IntroductionCongestive heart failure is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in Australia. Accurate data for the Northern Territory and Indigenous Australians are not presently available. The economic burden of...

Which Factors Explain the Rising Ethnic Heterogeneity in Italy? An Empirical Analysis at Province Level

The paper investigates the determinants of ethnic heterogeneity of the Italian provinces. Among other factors, the paper tests empirically whether gradual improvements in distant communication boost the generation of ethnically heterogeneous provinces. Consequently to easier communication, movers increasingly rely on an enlarged community for identity transmission, rather than on localized peer effects of the ethnic enclaves. The empirical estimation provides support to this hypothesis. Improvements in internet communications are found to increase the ethnic diversity of the Italian provinces.

Cache Bandwidth Allocation for P2P File-Sharing Systems to Minimize Inter-ISP Traffic

Many Internet service providers (ISPs) have deployed peer-to-peer (P2P) caches in their networks in order to decrease costly inter-ISP traffic. A P2P cache stores parts of the most popular contents locally, and if possible serves the requests of local peers to decrease the inter-ISP traffic. Traditionally, P2P cache resource management focuses on managing the storage resource of the cache so as to maximize the inter-ISP traffic savings. In this paper, we show that when there are many overlays competing for the upload bandwidth of a P2P cache, then in order to maximize the inter-ISP traffic savings, the cache's upload bandwidth should be actively allocated among the overlays. We formulate the problem of P2P cache bandwidth allocation as a Markov decision process and propose three approximations to the optimal cache bandwidth allocation policy. We use extensive simulations and experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed policies, and show that the bandwidth allocation policy that prioritizes swarms with a small ratio of local peers to all peers in the swarm can improve the inter-ISP traffic savings in BitTorrent-like P2P systems by up to 30%-60%.

A Cross Layer Collaborating Cache Scheme to Improve Performance of HTTP Clients in MANETs

This paper proposes a novel cross layer collaborating cache scheme for HTTP clients. It is designed to accelerate the process that an HTTP client retrieves Web content in mobile ad hoc network environment. Unlike other techniques to exploit Web proxy caching or to build P2P protocol overlay to improve HTTP, our scheme incorporates collaboratively working capability into the HTTP client response cache, and thus there is no impact on the compatibility of upper level applications. In addition, as the sharing file information is diffused with routing information, there is no redundant traffic to maintain the cooperating cache mechanism. Using this scheme, cacheable Web content can be distributed among local peers and retrieved later by a client if needed. In our simulation results, this novel cache scheme significantly decreases the latency experienced by a client to download Web content.

Contemporaneous peer effects, career age and the industry involvement of academics in biotechnology

This study explores the role of contemporaneous peer effects in driving an academic's involvement with industry. Specifically, we examine the influence of workplace peers and personal collaborators and how these effects are moderated by the career age of the scientist. Moreover, we look at situations in which both types of social influence are incongruent and the academic is faced with “dissonance”. Based on survey data of 355 German academics in the field of biotechnology and publication data from the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), we find that the scientist's involvement with industry increases with the orientation of the scientist's department toward industry (“localized peer effect”). This effect turns out to be moderated by the scientist's age, such that the localized peer effect decreases with age and finally turns negative for very senior scientists. Moreover, we find that a scientist's involvement increases with the industry orientation of the scientist's co-authors (“personal peer effect”), irrespective of the scientist's age. In case both types of social influence are incongruent, younger scientists will revert to localized norms while more experienced scientists will orient themselves more toward their personal collaborators.

Russian Accounting System: Value Relevance of Reported Information and the IFRS Adoption Perspective

In this paper I perform an empirical investigation into the value relevance of information reported by Russian public firms from two distinct perspectives. First, I document that prior to 2011, investors relied on information incorporated in the book value of equity. The value relevance of reported earnings, however, is different for “growth” versus “value” stocks. Second, I document that Russian leading firms listed on the London Stock Exchange that report in accordance with IFRS produce more value-relevant reports compared to their local peers that report under the Russian standards. This suggests that the mandatory IFRS adoption in Russia that will be completed by 2015 is likely to result in improved information quality.

Socio-environmental influences on physical activity among young people: a qualitative study

This multi-methods qualitative study aimed to identify environmental factors that influence physical activity participation among young people in Edinburgh, Scotland. School pupils (aged 11-13 years) took part using photography, computer blogs, maps and focus group discussions (FGDs). Eleven computer sessions (n = 131) and 14 FGDs (n = 63) took place. Factors influencing physical activity behaviour included proximity and access to local facilities, family and peers and the school physical activity environment. A variety of facilitators and barriers to participation were also reported. Most notable was the importance of cost and value for money when choosing physical activities which, although more evident among pupils attending schools in areas of low socio-economic status (SES), was relevant across all SES groups. Reporting easy access to sports facilities was more common among pupils attending schools from high/medium SES. Use of greenspace for physical activity was reported among pupils from all schools, but was more common among those from low SES schools. Pupils were, in general, satisfied with the facilities available at school, but felt time for physical education could be increased. Findings may help inform interventions, aimed at promoting physical activity at local level.

Do Peers Affect Determination of Work Hours? Evidence Based on Unique Employee Data from Global Japanese Firms in Europe

By using a unique dataset on managerial-level employees who were transferred from Japan to European branches of the same global firms, we examine what would happen to work hours when a worker moves from a long-hour-working country to relatively shorter-hour countries. Even after controlling for business cycles, unobserved individual heterogeneity, job characteristics, and work hour regulations, we find a significant decline in Japanese work hours after their transfer to Europe, resulting from working-behavior influences of locally hired staff. We also find that the reduction in hours worked highly depends on the extent of the workers’ interactions with local peers.

Training in Urban Medicine and Public Health

The number of U.S. medical school graduates who choose to practice in health professional shortage areas (HPSAs) has not kept pace with the needs of society. The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health has created a new program that prepares medical students to reduce health disparities for urban medically underserved populations in Milwaukee. The authors describe the Training in Urban Medicine and Public Health (TRIUMPH) program and provide early, short-term outcomes. TRIUMPH integrates urban clinical training, community and public health curricula, longitudinal community and public health projects, mentoring, and peer support for select third- and fourth-year medical students. The authors tracked and held focus groups with program participants to assess their knowledge, skills, satisfaction, confidence, and residency matches. The authors surveyed community partners to assess their satisfaction with students and the program. From 2009 to 2012, 53 students enrolled in the program, and 45 have conducted projects with community organizations. Participants increased their knowledge, skills, confidence, and commitment to work with urban medically underserved populations. Compared with local peers, TRIUMPH graduates were more likely to select primary care specialties and residency programs serving urban underserved populations. Community leaders have reported high levels of satisfaction and benefits; their interest in hosting students exceeds program capacity. Early, short-term outcomes confirm that TRIUMPH is achieving its desired goals: attracting and preparing medical students to work with urban underserved communities. The program serves as a model to prepare physicians to meet the needs of urban HPSAs.