“South Africa has a pressing need for more graduates of good quality, to take forward all forms of social and economic development” – Council for Higher Education (CHE)1. Within South Africa’s developing economy, accounting education at universities faces several challenges, including underprepared students, curriculum overload, and the need to apply a principle-based teaching model in…
Science is a very precise discipline. All phenomena have a scientific explanation and if anything or anybody defies science, scientists have terms such as ‘instinct’ and ‘evolution’ as possible explanations. Quadriplegic cerebral palsy is defined as, among others, “children with spastic or other forms of cerebral palsy who often face a lifetime of physical and…
At the end of 2012, the Association of Fraud Examiners (ACFE) released the findings of a fraud and corruption survey from some 1 400 respondents in 100 countries (appropriately captioned 2012 Report to the Nations) with the basic message being that fraud in the world today has reached seismic proportions. The foreword to the results…
Benefits of SAICA’s Academic Traineeship Programme During the course of our employment as academic trainees at the University of Stellenbosch we have had many rewarding experiences that will not only contribute towards our career development but also personal growth. An academic trainee (AT) is a person who elects to complete the first of their three…
The International Integrated Reporting Framework (IIRC) released its Framework in December 2013. The Framework is primarily geared to the private sector, but it can be applied by not-for-profit and public sector organisations. The Framework incorporates the public comments submitted to the IIRC on the draft Framework of April 2013. The Framework is available on www.sustainabilitysa.org…
The importance of transformation management should never be underestimated; what is the point of investing a substantial sum of money in a system that is designed to address all your current business pains if your staff never invest themselves fully in it? What happens is that your fancy new system sits in its shiny new…
Following the 2008 global financial crisis, there is a need to build a strong risk culture, develop a robust risk appetite framework, and increase the role of the board and board committees in risk governance. The essence of risk governance is oversight – in the sense that the board oversees organisational activities and risks –…
If you’re looking to invest some new capital in the markets during early 2014, you are facing some tough choices. Analysts vary as to their opinions, but the consensus seems to be that local markets are already expensive in the wake of a four-year bull market and hold considerable downside risks, while the value of…
Most developmental psychologists agree that what differentiates leaders is not so much their philosophy of leadership, their personality, or their style of management. Rather, it’s their internal ‘action logic’– how they interpret their surroundings and react when their power or safety is challenged. Relatively few leaders, however, try to understand their own action logic, and…
We don’t live in the world for which conventional risk-management textbooks prepare us. No forecasting model predicted the impact of the current economic crisis, and its consequences continue to take establishment economists and business academics by surprise. Moreover, as we all know, the crisis has been compounded by the banks’ so-called risk-management models, which increased…