Fraud, financial distress and liquidation, audit failures, hubris and narcissism, are all genuine and serious issues in today’s business environment. Challenges exist for organisations in many different guises as they strive to achieve their goals. This often results in a balancing act between the right course of action and action which could be seen to be ethically immoral or even illegal. Recently many organisations have encountered financial distress for different reasons, at a high cost to employees, pensioners, and other stakeholders. How can organisations ensure that legal and ethical decisions and actions are taken? Through a review of literature, recent case studies, and the incidence of relevant courses in universities, this paper examines the importance of education in the fight against corporate fraud. Evidence indicates that employees can be effective corporate watchdogs in the fight against financial deception and unethical decisions; increasing the number of people in a firm with enhanced fraud awareness and knowledge through education should, therefore, be one of the essential requirements for our future business managers and leaders. We indicate why anti-fraud education is important in the fight against financial shenanigans, and why it should be more widely adopted for the benefit of all stakeholders.

Accounting scandals are becoming perpetual in nature. They range from the ancient Mesopotamia, to the South Sea Bubble of 1720, to the famous Enron of 2001, down to Parmalat, Tesco, and Toshiba of today. The series of accounting scandals that have occurred in the last two decades calls for a greater concern by the accounting profession. The accounting scandals that have occurred in this 21st century alone have shown that there is a need to look beyond corporate governance in the fight against financial deception. In this paper, we argue that even in the face of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOA) of 2002 and other regulations around the world that are targeted towards effective corporate governance, accounting scandals have never ceased to occur. Most of the legislations that have been passed in recent times were targeted at corporate governance, forgetting the crucial role that audit plays within the agency relationship. And whenever there is any revelation of fraudulent financial reporting, investors do not ask who are the directors, but the first question they ask is who are the auditors? Hence, there is a need to improve audit quality by approaching it from a forensic accounting perspective in order to reduce the incidence of financial statement frauds in this era of information revolution, thus restoring investors' confidence back in the financial reporting process and corporate governance. In this paper, we propose a forensic accounting paradigm as a viable option for reducing accounting scandals, since this will compliment corporate governance systems.

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Palmer & Harvey (P&H) is a recent example of a UK corporate failure which raises questions about current corporate governance practice, the quality and integrity of audit reporting, and the "sugar coating" of Annual Reports. P&H is but one example of UK firms currently struggling to survive, or failing. The paper presents some details about the P&H case, and then considers questions about corporate governance practice, and whether it is designed to truly safeguard the interests of stakeholders; it raises questions about conventional audit reporting, and whether it is too limited in its analysis and reporting. The paper recommends a strengthening of corporate governance guidelines and practice within the terms of the current Financial Reporting Council (FRC) review, and a wider adoption of forensic accounting practice and reporting, in part taking account of the impact of behavioural factors in management practice. A wider study is proposed to take this analysis and discussion further.

Tenure is an important component of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) outcomes, as highlighted in this study and recent studies by Zhao (2022) and Bilgili, Calderon, Allen, and Kedia (2017). Research on top management teams (TMTs) has found that a good work relationship between senior managers enhances team cohesiveness, communication, and firm performance. This study explores the impact of the joint tenure of the chairperson and the CEO on M&A outcomes. We utilised the resource-based view (RBV), upper echelon theory, and season of tenure theory as theoretical lenses to explore joint tenure’s potential impact on M&A outcomes. Through a long-event window research methodology, which examines the cumulative abnormal returns to the acquirer’s shareholders for a period of three years following the completion date, this study found that the length of the period of joint tenure of the chairperson and CEO in acquiring firms was significantly positively correlated with the cumulative abnormal return (CAR) to acquiring firm shareholders during the three years following completion of an acquisition (CARB). Although this study has utilised 47 acquisitions in Australia from the period from 1990 up to the global financial crisis, our findings are quite revealing. They have contributed to the limited study on joint tenure