Good Governance

Abstract

The articles in this ‘bumper’ final issue of Australian Accounting Review for 2024 focus on decision-making by companies, showing the importance of good governance frameworks and practices to guide corporate leaders, committees and regulators.

The decisions explored in five academic articles cover a range of areas: climate-related risk disclosures, regional labour adjustments, the quality of audits, financial restatements following CEO dismissals and the disclosure of intangible assets in financial reports. The issue concludes with a discussion of how reporting and disclosure standard-setting itself should be governed.

In contrast, the last two academic articles in this issue highlight circumstances where good governance has made a difference. Gao et al. (2024) confirm the link found in the previous literature between poor performance and CEO dismissals, noting that good performance offers the CEO some protection in the event of financial restatements. Significantly, they find an increasing trend over the period 2000–2018 for CEOs to be dismissed as a result of financial restatements, which they link to more ethical governance.

The reporting of intangible assets is an area in which entities exercise a fair amount of discretion, and better guidance for the Board of directors would make corporate governance oversight of entities’ reporting and disclosure more effective. Mehnaz et al. (2024) document the diversity of reporting and disclosure practices by listed companies and public sector entities in New Zealand. They note how intangibles are categorised and reported and whether they are capitalised, concluding that there is a need for improved disclosure criteria for recognised and unrecognised criteria.

The final article in this issue documents the key issues from a recent topical debate on standard-setting. While the context is a particular change in Australia, the issues are relevant to the governance of standard-setting in any country and developments in New Zealand are highlighted for comparison. In Bradbury et al. (2024), four well-known commentators on standard-setting in Australia and New Zealand with academic, professional and standard-setting expertise present their views on the merits of the recently proposed merger of the Australian Accounting Standards Board (AASB), the Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (AuASB) and the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) into a single entity.

We hope that you enjoy reading this issue as much as we have enjoyed compiling it.