Professor Karl L. Bang

Professor Karl Bang is a UiTM Distinguished Visiting Professor who is currently attached with the Malaysian Institute of Transport (MITRANS). Prof Bang is a professor from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
Today he gave a professorial talk on "The Role of Centre of Excellence - The Swedish Experience, Bridging Postgraduate Research Programmes with Industry and Securing International Research Grants". He particularly cited the case of the Transport Research Commission (TRC), a centre of excellence at his university that has successfully work collaboratively with major Swedish transport related "actors" (government agencies shippers, forwarders, transport equipment producers, traffic authorities and universities) in order to achieve a common goal of "promoting efficient, safe and clean transport.
MITRANS should take advantage and synergize with TRC in order to play a more significant role in improving road safety and the public transport system in this country. Thanks Prof Bang for a very insightful feedback...

Get Well Soon Dr Wee Shu Hui

ARI wishes a Get Well Soon to one of its research fellows Associate Professor Dr Wee Shu Hui.

Seminar Sitting Layouts

What is the best sitting layouts for effective conferences? Yes, we want to deliberate our research findings, yet, most of the time we spend a lot of time and efforts trying to satisfy everyone, at least in term of sitting arrangements. Sometimes a lot of money is spent to cater for "good" breakfasts and lunches. In some others, a lot of time is "wasted" because we are allowing for too many tea and lunch breaks. In her recent encounters, Prof Normah saw these two sitting arrangements that were both cost and time efficient in nature. The first seminar was in Japan where participants are given lunch boxes and during lunch or tea break they can eat their foods in the seminar room itself. The second one was in London. Participants are seated in a roundtable format.
Tea/lunches were available at the foyer and participants can bring their foods to the table. No food or time wastage - seminar programs were kept as scheduled...just some "foods for thought"

Detection & Investigation Strategies

The third day of the training saw key fraud investigators sharing their own experiences through deliberation of their case studies: Volvo, Procter & Gamble, VMW, India Petroleum Company and many others. Investigators shared the need to instill the sense of urgency among employees that fraud means reduction of revenue and an escalation of cost. In the end, not only will fraud affects organisational performance, it will also eats up potential bonuses to be shared among employees of organisations. We were also told that fraud prevention mechanisms need not necessarily only in the forms of expensive tools or gadgets, in some cases, it could just be going to the ground and asking people questions; being more observance of the work ing environment; heightening responsibility and doing simple analysis of the expense trends..

Real World Cases

The second day of the training focussed on discussing real world detection and deterrence of fraud & corruption. Speakers are mainly fraud investigators or anti-fraud specialists and they shared their own experiences.
Among them were Peter Tickner who was formerly the director of internal audit of the Scotland Yard: Simon Scales is the director of global investigation TNT Express; Crawford Robenson, director Global Compliance Investigations Astrazaneca and Dave Verma, audit investigation manager, Brent Government UK. Two workshops were organized in the afternoon: Nigel Iyer and his team from the Septia Group on "How to Spot the Fraudster"; Bob Kendall and his team from TNT Express on "Informant, Evidence, Investigation, Breaches of policy and Dilemms in Between". The Fraud Summit is indirectly a place where those interested to fight fraud & corruption, meet and discuss prevention, deterrence, detection and investigation strategies.

MIS Training on Fraud

First day of the fraud summit 2010 course: A good attendance of about 120 participants from 27 nationalities. This year’s 4th annual summit is held at the Victory Services Club (VSC), Marble Arch London. VSC is the British Army’s prestigious club. The key themes and learning format over the next three days are as follows: Day One – A strategic Approach to Preventing, Deterring and Frustrating Fraud & Corruption; Day Two – Real World Detection & Deterrence of Fraud & Corruption and Day Three – Investigation, Enforcement & Recovery of Fraud & Corruption. In addition, the summit is introducing a new “Dramatic Pub Quiz”. Well perhaps ARI can co-organise the Fraud Summit 2012 with MIS in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia. MIS is willing to consider the proposal

Down Memory Lane....

Prof Normah's next visit was to Manchester Metropolitan University Business School (MMUBS), her alma mater. In a lot of ways, MMU is very much like uitm. Formerly a polytechnic, it was upgraded to a university in 1992. Then the need to highten the research culture began. The MMUBS's transformation is now very much visible both physically and culturally. Today, there are many renowned professors and researchers at the Business School. Prof Normah's supervisor, Graham Holt is now the head of department.
Discusssions during the meeting included students excahange program, internship in Manchester during the summer holidays, "top up" master programs (MMUBS currently has special master programs in collaboration with ACCA, CIMA and ICAEW) and research collaboration in the area of forensic accounting.

Interview Sessions and CoE Launching Meetings

The Dividend Policy research group will be organising two very important interviews with the top management of the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) and SOCSO. The main objective of the interviews is to obtain first hand information from institutional investors on their views of companies, particularly public listed companies (PLCs) having written dividend policy for their shareholders. The dividend policy research is a collaborative project with the Minority Shareholders Watchdog Group (MSWG). In addition to the interviews, another ARI group members will be attending meetings with the Ministry of Higher Education to discuss details of the forthcoming launch of HICoE on 1st April. Thanks guys for such great teamwork.

Greetings from Teesside University

As part and parcel of the UK visit, Prof Dr Normah visited the Forensic Science unit of the University of Teesside in Middlesborough UK. The Forensic Science unit is working very closely with the police department in the North Eastern area of the UK. The unit is supported by two amazing Crime Scene houses and an independent Digital Computer Forensic laboratory. There are a number of very experienced researchers who were formerly police officers. Currently, one of the faculty's staff is pursuing her phd program in forensic accounting at Teesside University.

Hello from London...

Prof Dr Normah is attending the Fraud Summit 2010 to be held in London on 17-19 March 2010. In addition to the summit, she will also be visiting some professors in the United Kingdom for possible research collaboration in the areas of Islamic Accounting & Financial Criminology. Some postings of this blog will be made from there this week...

Seminar on Leadership and Change

The Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) invited four of our researchers to attend a CIMA seminar entitled The Role of Management Accountants in Leadership and Change at the One World Hotel Kuala Lumpur.
The speaker, Professor Robert Greenwood has extensive international consultancy experience in Higher Education, having successfully established Undergraduate and Postgraduate programmes in Hong Kong, China, Malaysia and Vietnam; and contributed to World Bank Projects in Turkey and DFID Projects in the Czech Republic.
He is the author of several accounting textbooks published by Gower and the AIA and numerous research papers published by IFAC, Journal of Enterprising Culture and the Czech Management Centre.
Professor Greenwood also holds two Professorships by Chinese Universities in recognition of his development of accounting education and joint research within these Universities. Most importantly the training sessions were fun and interactive. We certainly enjoyed the training. Thanks Prof Greenwood

Teaching and Learning Centre at ARI....

Associate Prof Dr Rohana Othman has indicated her interest to initiate a teaching and learning centre at ARI. As a director of teaching and learning at the university's Institute of Leadership & Quality Management (ILQAM), Dr Rohana is the right person to lead this centre. The centre will focus on action research related to university teaching and learning. This centre will best serve those lecturers who are keen to experiment new teaching and learning methodology. Now that the university is focussing on Problem-based learning (PBL), Outcome-based Education (OBE), Student-centre Learning (SCL), it is timely that ARI leads the way. ARI and faculty members can greatly benefit from this centre.

The Weekend Senate

The university senators attended the weekend senate to deliberate and discuss curriculum of various faculties. Basically the discussions were focused on transforming the traditional format to OBE-compliance format.
The good thing about the weekend senate is the fact we do not need to rush and the discussions were very focused. Within the OBE framework, there's a lot of need to do action research in teaching and learning. We need to develop an assessment tool to measure the effectiveness of the OBE-based curriculum. The most important fact is how do we measure the effect of the OBE curriculum on the students? How do we measure their ability in communication, enterprenuership, creativity and innovation?

A farewell Lunch Do for Jane Lazar

Thanks Associate Professor Jane Lazar for throwing a farewell lunch for all of us at the faculty. We will certainly miss her.
Jane has been with the university for more than thirty years and has contributed significantly for the development of the faculty. She promises to help out with the editing work for ARI's publications. After all she is the author of many accounting books. Her contributions will continue....

ARI Research Workshop

Prof Rashidah will be organising a half day research workshop tomorrow. Basically the workshop is to focus on preparing research proposals in the areas of financial criminology and Islamic Finance. Selected proposals will be financed by ARI & MOHE. Faculty members including post graduate students are encouraged to participate in the workshop.

Auditing Oversight Board Seminar

ARI in collaboration with the Malaysian Institute of Accountants and MAREF organized a one-day seminar on Auditing Oversight Board and Ethical Dimension at the Securities Commission, Kuala Lumpur. The need to reform the current audit oversight framework is important as the discovery of serious irregularities in financial reporting leading to the collapse of large globally-recognised firms over the years have raised concerns on the credibility of the audit profession, audit oversight and regulatory response, said Securities Commission's (SC) executive director Goh Ching Yin in an opening speech today(The Edge).

Congratulations to Three Docs

ARI and the Faculty of Accountancy wish to congratulate three more PhD-qualified lecturers who had just successfully completed their program: Associate Professor Dr Zaini Ahmad (An internal auditor's commitment to independence: Influence of role theory and audit-based monitoring mechanisms), Dr Hilwani Hariri (Non-audit service fee, audit tenure, audit competition and professionalism: The perspective of external auditor and government auditor)and Dr Sharifah Khadijah Syed Agil (Compliance to Code of Ethics: A mixed method study on Malaysian accounting profession).

Congratulations FRGS Recipients

ARI wishes to congratulate all researchers who have been successful in securing the fundamental research grant scheme UiTM received grants for 193 projects. From its eight submissions, ARI secured three successful grants. The three projects are namely "Effectiveness of Investment Tax Incentives on SME Performance: Pioneer Status and Investment tax Allowance" from PM Dr Rohaya Mohd Noor, Prof Dr Mustaffa Mohamed Zain and Nadiah Abd Hamid; "IFRS Implementation: The Deavelopment of Reporting Quality Index for malaysian Private Companies" from PM Dr Roshayani Arshad, Kamaruzzaman Muhammad, Nur Adura Ahmad Norudin and Maslinawati Mohamad and "Financial Fraud Risks and Internal Control System of Malaysian Companies: Extending the Fraud Triangle Theory to Fraud Diamond Theory" from Prof Dr Normah Omar, Intan Salwani Mohammed and Hesri Faizal Mohd Din. ARI hopes more members will submit their proposals for the forthcoming FRGS evaluation