Improving financial reporting standards in Vietnam’s public companies: The crucial role of audit committees

This study applied Altman Z-score model to assess the bankruptcy risk of a set of multidisciplinary enterprises of various types, mainly small and medium enterprises, with data taken from official financial reports of 180 enterprises in Soc Trang province. The binary logistic regression was employed to assess the impact of non-financial and financial factors on the bankruptcy risk of enterprises. The research findings showed that both the non-financial factors such as business area, types and size of the business, the educational level of managers and executors and other characteristics, and the financial factors (indicators) such as earnings before tax, net profit/equity ratio, earnings before interest and tax/total assets ratio, equity/total debt ratio, affect the bankruptcy risk of enterprises. Predicting the bankruptcy risk and measuring its determinants play an important role not only as an effective managing tool of the business, but also as evidence for policymakers to support the sustainable development of business.

This study contributes to the recent “managerial ability” literature and analyses the impact of audit committees’ financial and sustainability expertise (i.e. combined and separately as individuals) on the readability of integrated reports. Analyses were conducted with data on a sample of European Union (EU) public interest entities (PIE) from the Examples Database of the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) for the fiscal years 2014–2016 (i.e. 215 firm-year observations). Correlation and regression analyses were conducted to evaluate possible links between either financial or sustainability expertise and combined financial and sustainability expertise in audit committees and the readability of integrated reports, as measured by the Flesch Reading Ease and Gunning Fog indices. While audit committees’ financial and sustainability expertise has a positive impact on the readability of integrated reports, combined expertise has a stronger effect compared with either financial or sustainability expertise. This finding is in line with the idea that, to combine financial and sustainability information in integrated reports, audit committees need to have more diverse expertise. Companies, regulators and researchers could be significantly affected by the finding that managerial ability variables such as audit committee expertise can have a considerable impact on integrated reporting.

The widespread use of information and communication technologies and subsequent transformations have led to the formation of a digital economy (DE). The European Union, as an international organization, has become the subject of building such an economy, striving to bring member countries closer in the field of digitalization.
The aim of this paper is to compare the DE development parameters of the EU countries based on cluster analysis and determine the most significant of them to solve the problems of bridging the digital divide between countries. For clustering, a feature DE vector of 20 indicators was created and the k-means algorithm and the Euclidean distance metric were used. For classification, the decision tree method was applied.
Three clusters of EU countries were identified by the level of DE development (leaders, followers and outsiders), which allowed assessing their positions relative to each other. Key parameters that determine countries’ positions in the general rating are identified. A parameter chart is generated to control the establishment of DE in the EU countries, which, in addition to key parameters, includes maximum, minimum and harmonic mean values of these parameters by cluster. This characterizes the landscape of DE development in the EU countries, assesses the digital divide and is the basis for decision-making in the area of bridging this divide.