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Purpose: This paper aims to explore how corporate Australia engages in reconciliation through recognizing and providing pathways for Indigenous Australians' corporate leadership aspirations. Design/methodology/approach: The research design is informed by the prior literature on pathways by minority groups to corporate leadership through the theoretical lens of transformational leadership. The investigation is conducted using textual analysis of reconciliation action plans (RAPs), a contemporary and voluntary practice adopted by Australian listed companies to disclose their commitment to national reconciliation. RAPs are publicly available from the official websites of listed companies. Findings: The analysis of contemporary RAPs highlights organizational initiatives to support Indigenous Australians related to corporate and community leadership. Since the authors' focus is the former, corporate leadership initiatives are further analyzed. Two initiatives for Indigenous Australians to pursue corporate leadership positions are emerging future leaders' programs and mentoring programs. This is the extent to which the authors observe Australian firms' transformational leadership. While some firms have implemented these initiatives with specific targets, other firms do not have specific initiatives or targets. The paper also conducts longitudinal analysis into the transformational leaders' past RAPs and triangulates to other evidence of reconciliation commitment such as the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Research limitations/implications: This paper contributes new insights to the research area of board cultural diversity, specifically to the limited literature on Indigenous reconciliation. It provides insights into firms and policymakers to address the ongoing issue of the underrepresentation of Indigenous Australians in corporate leadership. The sample of firms comprises Australian listed firms that have adopted higher-order RAPs, which restricts the generalizability of the findings to other sectors. Originality/value: This paper explores the under researched phenomenon of Indigenous people's pathways to corporate leadership. The research design is informed by transformational leadership theory through considering institutional actions for reconciliation. This research provides evidence of the extent to which corporate Australia has taken action on the issue of the under-representation of Australian Indigenous people in corporate leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Temporary labour mobility programmes (TLMPs) are initiated by high-income nations to fill their labour demands by offering temporary work opportunities to migrants from low-income nations. TLMPs also seek to contribute to economic development in workers' home countries. This paper aims to assess the accountability of New Zealand's Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) Scheme and Australia's Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) in reaching their economic development objectives in one sending nation, Samoa. Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative study with RSE and SWP workers and key informants (collectively stakeholders) in Samoa was undertaken to assess the contributions of these schemes to economic development. An interdisciplinary research approach was taken using the Pacific methodology of talanoa. Talanoa was used to "operationalise engagement" and empower local stakeholder accounts. Findings: Talanoa supported the elicitation of accounts that contributed nuanced insights into the accountability of TLMPs. Specifically, stakeholder accounts revealed limitations in the ability of the RSE Scheme and SWP to meet their economic development objectives for Samoan communities and workers. Adjustments are necessary to meet Pacific nations' economic development objectives. Practical implications: This study responds to calls for on-the-ground accounts of stakeholders involved in TLMPs. It provides insights that may contribute to the development of more effective TLMPs, particularly regarding economic development in workers' home countries. Originality/value: Drawing on dialogic accounting literature, which calls for engagement with the marginalised, a talanoa approach has been engaged to assess TLMPs via on-the-ground participant accounts in a specific context. This paper introduces talanoa to the critical and social accounting literature, to move beyond a typical accounting qualitative interview process and encourage greater engagement and collaboration with Pacific scholars and partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The paper aims to investigate how accounting techniques, when embedded within data-driven public-sector management systems, mask and intensify the neoliberal ideological commitments of powerful state and corporate actors. The authors explore the role of accounting in the operationalisation of "instrumentarian power" (Zuboff, 2019) – a new form of power that mobilises ubiquitous digital instrumentation to ensure that algorithmic architectures can tune, herd and modify behaviour. Design/methodology/approach: The authors employ a qualitative archival analysis of publicly available data related to the automation of welfare-policing systems to explore the role of accounting in advancing instrumentarian power. Findings: In exploring the automation of Australia's welfare debt recovery system (Robodebt), this paper examines a new algorithmic accountability that has emerged at the interface of government, technology and accounting. The authors show that accounting supports both the rise of instrumentarian power and the intensification of neoliberal ideals when buried within algorithms. In focusing on Robodebt, the authors show how the algorithmic reconfiguration of accountability within the welfare system intensified the inequalities that welfare recipients experienced. Furthermore, the authors show that, despite its apparent failure, it worked to modify welfare recipients' behaviour to align with the neoliberal ideals of "self-management" and "individual responsibility". Originality/value: This paper addresses Agostino, Saliterer and Steccolini's (2021) call to investigate the relationship between accounting, digital innovations and the lived experience of vulnerable people. To anchor this, the authors show how algorithms work to mask the accounting assumptions that underpin them and assert that this, in turn, recasts accountability relationships. When accounting is embedded in algorithms, the ideological potency of calculations can be obscured, and when applied within technologies that affect vulnerable people, they can intensify already substantial inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper considers how archival accounting records may support truth-telling about past atrocities during Australia's frontier wars. Design/methodology/approach: The study examines two colonial accounting records – military muster payrolls and the ledger statements of a local tax fund – used during the British's punitive expeditions against the Aboriginal peoples of Sydney in 1816. Findings: The accounting records reveal new information about the full scale of the campaign, the degree to which the violence was formally endorsed and acts of Aboriginal resistance. However, much of the human toll of the campaign remains obscured by the highly structured, monetary lens of financial records authored and archived by the British colonial regime. Social implications: Australia's First Nations have called for greater truth-telling about the frontier wars to enable meaningful reconciliation and political recognition of Indigenous sovereignty. This study highlights the potential role of accounting records as a resource for contemporary truth-telling processes. Originality/value: The study contributes to the literature about the dark history of accounting by explicating genre features in the content, form and context of archival accounting records, which can both render past atrocities more visible as well as perpetrate invisibilities, ambiguities and silences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The paper reports on a study that investigated the (potential) impact of client use of blockchain technology on financial statement audits of Australian accounting firms. Design/methodology/approach: Data were primarily collected from semi-structured interviews with a range of stakeholders including audit partners from first- and second-tier accounting firms in Australia. The interviews focused on the perceived (potential) impact of blockchain on the stages of obtain (retain) engagement, engagement planning, risk assessment, audit evidence and reporting of financial statement audits of clients that use blockchain technology. Perceptions of changes to financial statement audits were interpreted using the logics of professionalism and commercialism. Findings: Australian accounting firms have either obtained or considered engagements with clients with a cryptocurrency business or that use a blockchain platform although they are a small group. There is a view that blockchain technology is distinctive and therefore poses risks not encountered before in audit engagements. These risks would most likely shift how firms plan, design audit methodologies and execute financial statement audits. The study showed that the logics of professionalism and commercialism are not conflicting but instead complementary. They present both opportunities and challenges for firms to apply and develop audit expertise in an emerging area in audit. Research limitations/implications: Being an exploratory study, the findings are tentative. A case study of an audit engagement with a cryptocurrency business will add to a nuanced understanding of the challenges posed to financial statement audits by blockchain technology. Originality/value: This study is novel because of its focus on the impact of an evolving technology on the stages of financial statement audits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The paper explores the creation in Australia of the Register of Accountants for National Service. Established at the outset of the Second World War, the Register operated for four years from June 1940 providing voluntary, non-remunerated, part-time and after-hours services to a highly stressed and seriously stretched federal government bureaucracy by members of the main Australian professional accounting bodies. Departments of the Navy, Army, Air Force, Supply and Development and Munitions were the largest consumers of the services offered. Design/methodology/approach: The study of the Register relies mainly on an extensive archive of war-time documentation from the Federal Government and various accounting professional institutes which has survived, predominantly in the National Archives of Australia. The resource is particularly rich in material covering the complex negotiation processes that brought the Register into operation together with documentation recording and reporting the work of the Register. The themes of professionalization, institutional legitimacy, volunteerism and patriotism are all invoked to explain the presence of the Register in the machinery of government that was assembled to deliver the ultimately successful war effort. Created by the principal professional accounting institutes, the Register attests to the commitment of their members to the war effort and, thereby, the importance of the profession to Australian society. Findings: The perilous situation of Australia at a time of war provided a compelling incentive for the accounting profession to organise itself in an efficient and highly effective manner to assist with the war effort. The disparate and somewhat fractured accounting profession at the time was able to work together in a structured, cohesive and disciplined manner to provide voluntary services when called upon. To deliver the voluntary services promised, a purpose-built set of institutional arrangements was put in place. An extensive inventory of the potential services that could be provided by members of the main professional accounting bodies was conducted to facilitate the smooth matching of government needs with services available. Research limitations/implications: Discussion focusses only on Australia where the Register was unique. No other examples have been discovered where a profession has self-mobilised to serve a nation in a time of war. A further limitation is that the activities reported are restricted to self-reporting by the Register and a small loose collection of documents prepared by the Department of the Navy. Originality/value: The uniqueness of the Register is the core of the originality and value of this study. How and why it came into being and the method by which it completed the "task" assigned to it stand as testament to a profession strategically placed to contribute in a substantive manner to the war effort at minimal cost to the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The authors explore the Australian Government's implementation of budgetary measures to manage the social and economic impacts of COVID-19, paying particular attention to how the country's history of inequality has shaped these actions, and the effect inequality may have on outcomes. Design/methodology/approach: In this qualitative case study of public budgeting, the authors draw on the latest research into inequality to consider the implications of policy responses to COVID-19 in Australia. In particular, we examine the short-term introduction of what we term "people-focused" budgetary measures. These appeared contrary to the dominant neoliberalist approach to Australian welfare policymaking. Findings: This paper foregrounds the relationship between budgeting, public policy and inequality and explores how decades of increasingly regressive tax systems and stagnating living wages have made both people, and the state, vulnerable to crises like COVID. Social implications: There is still much to learn about the role of accounting in the shaping of growing economic inequality. In focusing on public budgeting within the context of COVID, the authors suggest ways accounting researchers can contribute to our understanding of economic inequality, both in terms of drivers and consequences. The authors hope to contribute to a growing body of accounting research that can influence social movements, political debates and policymaking, while also raising awareness of the consequences of wealth and income inequality. Originality/value: The authors explore ways accounting scholars might help articulate a post-COVID future that avoids recreating the inequalities of the past and present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study explores accounting practice in an Indigenous organization. This organization is embedded within a rural Aboriginal community in the country currently known as Australia. In doing so, this study illustrates the intertwining of accounting practice, practitioners, organizations and social/cultural context, while recognizing that the cultural embeddedness of accounting is not uniform. Design/methodology/approach: Empirical materials were collected as part of a qualitative field study with an Indigenous organization. Specific methods include interviews, informal conversations, documentary reviews and participant observations. These materials were analysed through a Bourdieusian perspective. Findings: By working with Indigenous Peoples on the ground, rather than relying on secondary materials, this study highlights how the values of a community challenge and reorient accounting practice towards community aspirations. This study illustrates how fields beyond the organization influence accounting practice, including in budgeting and assurance. Originality/value: Exploring Indigenous practices of accounting maintains Indigenous agency and opens up space for alternative understandings and practices of accounting. By illustrating how a community can influence the accounting practice of an organization, this study has implications for wider understandings of the cultural embeddedness of mainstream accounting and possible alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the COVID-19 pandemic risk disclosures in a sample of annual reports of Australian public universities. These universities rely heavily on fee-paying onshore overseas students. Analysing these risk disclosures is essential to understanding the COVID-19 crisis and the implications for organisational change. Design/methodology/approach: Document analysis and content analysis of the 2019 annual reports of all Victorian public universities were undertaken to identify the disclosure of COVID-19 risk impacts. Applying Laughlin's Habermasian insights of change, the study explores the pathways of change adopted by universities to overcome the risk impacts. However, financial risk disclosures about income from this source were virtually non-existent. Findings: Any risk associated with COVID-19 disclosed was minimal in a qualitative, neutral and constant format. The quality of disclosures was low. Media statements, however, pointed to significant income loss and suggested a strategy of substantial cost-cutting, including employee redundancies, which we identified as morphostatic changes of universities to overcome the risk impacts. Research limitations/implications: The study reveals the risk associated with sector's aggressive growth strategy, jeopardising their financial viability and quality of teaching and research. Practical implications: The findings provide insights to the Australian higher education sector. The low quality of external risk disclosures of these universities suggests an urgent need for transformation. Originality/value: Australian public universities play a crucial role in society. This role will be diminished by a failure to disclose and manage significant risks adequately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The monetary valuation of cultural heritage of a selection of 16 major public, not-for-profit Australian cultural institutions is examined over a period of almost three decades (1992–2019) to understand how they have responded to the paradoxical tensions of heritage valuation for financial reporting purposes. Design/methodology/approach: Accounting for cultural heritage is an intrinsically paradoxical practice; it involves a conflict of two opposite ways of attributing value: the traditional accounting and the heritage professionals (or curatorial) approaches. In analysing the annual reports and other documentary sources through qualitative content analysis, the study explores how different actors responded to the conceptual and technical contradictions posed by the monetary valuation of "heritage assets", the accounting phraseology of accounting standards. Findings: Four phases emerge from the analysis undertaken of the empirical material, each characterised by a distinctive nature of the paradox, the institutional responses discerned and the outcomes. Although a persisting heterogeneity in the practice of accounting for cultural heritage is evident, responses by cultural institutions are shown to have minimised, so far, the negative impacts of monetary valuation in terms of commercialisation of deaccessioning decisions and distorted accountability. Originality/value: In applying the theoretical lens of paradox theory in the context of the financial reporting of heritage, as assets, the study enhances an understanding of the challenges and responses by major public cultural institutions in a country that has led this development globally, providing insights to accounting standard setters arising from the accounting practices observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]