Mary B. Burns

Identification of fraudulent financial statements using linguistic credibility analysis

The strategic use of deceptive language in managerial financial fraud is investigated with linguistic cues extracted from 202 publicly available financial disclosures. Those crafting fraudulent disclosures use more activation language, words, imagery, pleasantness, group references, and less lexical diversity than non-fraudulent ones. Writers of fraudulent disclosures may write more to appear credible while communicating less in actual content. A parsimonious model with Naive Bayes and C4.5 achieved the highest classification accuracy. Results support the potential use of linguistic analyses by auditors to flag questionable financial disclosures and to assess fraud risk under Statement on Auditing Standards No. 99.

A Theoretical Justification for Using Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) to Augment Accounting-Related Interviews

ABSTRACT: In todays increasingly complex business environment, accounting firms face additional pressures regarding cost reduction, engagement scope, and attention to quality. This paper proposes that embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are particularly well suited to automate and augment accounting interviews to save costs, streamline the interviewing process, and maintain quality. An ECA is an autonomous computer interface capable of human-like interactions such as interviews. This paper describes how an ECA can be used to augment accounting-related interviews and the advantages and disadvantages of doing so. This paper also presents the ECA Self-Disclosure Model with propositions of how self-disclosure can be influenced by an ECA through reciprocal behavior and rapport building. The model and propositions are supported by the computers-as-social-actors (CASA) paradigm (Reeves and Nass 1996). This paper concludes by discussing limitations of ECA use in the real world and by recommending how the model...

What Kind of Interventions Can Help Users from Falling for Phishing Attempts: A Research Proposal for Examining Stage-Appropriate Interventions

Because successful phishing attacks are expensive to society, it is imperative to understand how to promote protective behavior for IS end-users. Our research program in progress will extend IS Security research by empirically testing a theoretical hybrid continuum-stage model of protective behavior of IS end-users. The results of the first step of our research program confirmed that users progress through stages of preventive behavior, ranging from a denial stage (Stage 0), an awareness stage (Stage 1), and, finally, a coping and planning stage (Stage 2) over time. Thus, there is a need to understand how we can design and empirically test stage-appropriate interventions to move users from one stage to the next. Informed by the literature in health behavior change models, this proposed second phase of our research program will longitudinally monitor the effects of both simulated phishing attempts and stage-appropriate interventions in a field experiment.