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- All Subjects: Occupational Fraud
- All Subjects: Wall Street
- Creators: Orpurt, Steven
- Creators: Dennis, Lauren Nicole
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
Description
The main goal of this study was to understand the awareness of small business owners regarding occupational fraud, meaning fraud committed from within an organization. A survey/questionnaire was used to gather insight into the knowledge and perceptions of small business owners, while also obtaining information about the history of fraud and the internal controls within their business. Twenty-four owners of businesses with less than 100 employees participated in the study. The results suggest that small business owners overestimate their knowledge regarding internal controls and occupational fraud, while also underestimating the risk of fraud within their own business. In fact, 92% of participants were not at all familiar with the popular Internal Control \u2014 Integrated Framework published by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission. The results also show that small business owners tend to overestimate the protection provided by their currently implemented controls in regard to their risk of fraud. Overall, through continued knowledge of internal controls and occupational fraud, business owners can better protect their businesses from the risk of occupational fraud by increasing their awareness of fraud.
ContributorsDennis, Lauren Nicole (Author) / Orpurt, Steven (Thesis director) / Munshi, Perseus (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / School of Accountancy (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Financial distress and restructuring is a core component of the corporate finance advisor's arsenal and is needed in nearly all market conditions, whether recessionary or expansionary. Financial distress means that a company is in present or future danger of not being able to pay its financial obligations. There are many market indicators of distress which may include: debt trading significantly below face value, stock price trading at or below $1 per share, and implied negative shareholders' equity on the balance sheet. In order to remedy financial distress, the debtor and its creditors seek to hire investment banks specializing in financial restructuring to help fix the debtors's capital structure and possibly navigate through a bankruptcy process. Stephen Moyer describes financial restructuring as "the process of transforming a firm's capital structure to better fit the current and/or future circumstances of the firm" (53). The way that this is accomplished is reducing the debtor's liabilities in order to accurately reflect asset value. Liabilities may be adjusted in out-of-court restructuring agreements or in-court bankruptcy restructurings. The former is often quite difficult considering the hostile nature of the situation and competing interests but is preferred if possible. The latter is most common but also usually both lengthy and expensive. In most cases, the liabilities will be exchanged for new liabilities or equity, providing the creditors with some form of recovery, and leaving the debtor in a healthier position post-emergence. In order to put myself into the shoes of a financial restructuring advisor, I conducted a technical case study on Eastman-Kodak by recreating a financial model depicting possible returns to creditors and emergence from bankruptcy. This model is depicted within the thesis.
ContributorsEghlimi, Sean Cameron (Author) / Licon, Lawrence (Thesis director) / Orpurt, Steven (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-12
Description
This study explores whether finance students at Arizona State University learn important technical business concepts at a textbook level and, if they do, do they recognize when to use them in real-world scenarios. These questions are important because the ability to learn and adapt knowledge to different situations is a desirable skill for a business professional. I chose NPV as the concept to test because it is arguably the central concept to learn in business school. Additionally, NPV is specifically taught in at least two courses by the time students graduate and it is frequently applied in business. The main hypothesis the study intends to explore is: students that have taken finance 300 will be able to identify the NPV problem. Survey results indicated that only 47% of students could identify the NPV problem. Further results indicated that only 27% of the original 100% (8 out of 30) participants could further apply NPV knowledge. Additional analyses based on grade earned and personal confidence level showed that having higher of either of the attributes generally showed the ability to identify NPV. Based on the results, I propose teaching more application-based learning to enhance career-readiness. Further research, expanding on these results, could be made to formulate a function to predict a student’s ability to identify NPV before being surveyed. This function could then be used to predict the outcome of the next student tested and allow for change to be made in teaching techniques.
ContributorsGomez, Andrew (Author) / Orpurt, Steven (Thesis director) / Hillegeist, Stephen (Committee member) / School of Accountancy (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05