Nafsiah Mohamed

An exploratory study on the possibility of misappropriation of assets occurring in a local authority

Over the years, local authorities in Malaysia have been saddled with more responsibilities especially with the increasing number of fraud cases reported. While the discussion of fraud in local authorities usually focuses on corruption, this paper takes light on misappropriation of assets. The findings from a survey and an interview revealed that misappropriation of assets was a problem to the selected local authority and the likelihood of misappropriation of assets to occur in the future was high.

Insight of Anti-Corruption Initiatives in Malaysia

Abstract This study provides an overview of corruption in Malaysia. In 2014, the President of World Bank, Jim Young Kim, released a shocking statement which described corruption as dangerous activities than terrorism to the humanity as it is able to siphon off an estimated of

Leadership Factors in Organizational Change Process: Observations from the Perspective of Management Accounting

1 trillion from developing countries through bribery, money laundering, tax evasions, extortion and other financial crimes (CBC News, 2014). Apart from that, in Malaysia, the cost that Malaysia has to bear due to the corruption activities is as much as RM 10 billion per year, or 1 to 2 percent of gross domestic product annually (GTP 1.0, Fighting Corruption). These adverse effects have diverted government attention towards searching for effective measures to curb corruption thus resulted in a variety of anti-corruption initiatives in Malaysia.

Corporate Governance Accountable to Financial Distress

Worldwide efforts to transform the public sector under the theme of “New Public Management” have been concerned with the issues of organizational change management. The change in the Accounting sector is one of the pillars of such efforts. This paper promotes the importance of leadership roles within the accounting change process by studying them within the context of a corporatized public sector entity. It offers a longitudinal analysis (1998‐2005) through the framework of “levers of control”. Leadership roles within the accounting scenario are compared with leadership roles within the engineering scenario to demonstrate the importance of accounting in mediating leadership roles, and in the end, promote the organization’s operational and financial performance. Through the framework of levers of control, this paper examines the different approaches and styles of an organizational leader in aligning beliefs systems among the workers, and creating management control systems through the mobilization of accounting calculative and constitutive power. This paper argues the importance of studying the characteristics of good leadership with in the organizational transformation process, particularly within the change management accounting practice that could lead to better organizational performance of the organization.

Financial performance of Malaysian local authorities: A trend analysis

Good corporate governance companies are associated with superior financial performance. The better the governance practice of companies the better the performance and the lower probability of financial distress. This chapter examines whether there is any significant difference in probability of financial distress of companies with good corporate governance and weak corporate governance. Top-ranked MSWG companies representing good quality of corporate governance practices and non-ranked companies representing weak or poor quality of corporate governance practices. Probability of financial distress is measured using Altman Z-score. Lower probability of financial distress is found in the good corporate governance companies. However, it was found that there is no significant difference between good and weak companies in their categories of financial distress. This reveals that whether a firm has high or low quality of corporate governance, the chances that the firm being predicted as distress, healthy or grey area is almost the same regardless of their corporate governance practice.