CQUniversity Accounting lecturer Kazi Islam recently presented papers at two conferences in the USA, gaining a 'best-paper' award in the Accounting Research track at one event...

The other paper co-authored with his doctoral supervisor Professor Sheikh Rahman (also from CQUni) was presented at a prestigious gathering in Baton Rouge, the 1st Annual AAA (American Accounting Association) Forensic and Investigative Accounting Section Research Conference .

Kazi Islam Both the papers were based in an emerging field of accounting research called 'Forensic and Investigative Accounting'.

"These papers covered both the US and Australian perspective of Forensic and Investigative Accounting," Kazi said.

His 'best paper' award at the International Conference of Accounting, Business, Leadership and Information Management in New Orleans was about 'A social-psychology perspective of WorldCom failure: appraising accounting manipulation in the lens of fraud triangle'.

Kazi says that, using the biggest case of corporate failure in the history of corporate America as a case study, he chose the 'fraud triangle' theory from the sociological criminology literature.

"The facts suggest that the three factors - incentives, opportunities and rationalisation - worked in conjuncture to explain the accounting manipulation in WorldCom," he said.

Meanwhile Kazi and Professor Rahman also chose the fraud-triangle' theory for their AAA conference paper explaining the circumstances of accounting manipulation prior to the collapse of HIH Insurance - the biggest case of corporate failure in Australia.

"Available evidences suggest that a simultaneous existence of greed, incentives, subjective judgements for accounting estimates, absence of governance, and lack of penalties for wrong doing had combined effects on the collapse of HIH. The pre and post-collapse attitudes of the senior management in HIH demonstrated the ways of rationalising manipulation," they said.