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Drawing on legitimacy and upper-echelon theory, this paper aims to investigate the moderating role of corporate governance in the relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and board gender diversity (BGD).

Using Morgan Stanley Capital International measures of social and governance performance, the authors use 2,950 firm-year observations from US companies for the years 2016–2020 to show that good performance on social issues drives BGD.

The panel data model indicates that the relationship between CSP and BGD is strengthened when firms display robust corporate governance.

This study contributes to the extant literature through empirical consideration of CSP as a predictor of BGD, a relationship that has rarely been examined. It further highlights the significant role of corporate governance in ensuring that women have access to corporate boards. Discussion and findings highlight that social performance and governance may significantly contribute to the diversity of socially cognizant boards.

American International Group, Inc. (AIG) has recently been charged with reporting bogus transactions that hid losses and inflated its net worth. The New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer alleges that AIG inflated reserves used for paying claims by millions of dollars and that AIG's CEO Maurice Greenberg repeatedly directed AIG traders late in the day to buy AIG shares to prop up its price, among other allegations. We examine the accounting errors for which AIG and Greenberg are being charged and analyze the opportunities missed by the auditors to detect problems, within the framework of corporate governance. That is, we evaluate the corporate environment that supported these lapses and provided an environment conducive to the perpetration and acceptance of fradulent reporting. We discuss how corporate governance not only promotes better financial reporting, but provides a level of scrutiny that encourages more ethical behavior at all levels of the corporate hierarchy, and we discuss the imperative for accounting education.

The insurance industry has been marked by exponential growth over the recent decade with more and more individuals and corporations appealing to the long-term security, which this service sector provides. As facts about ethical lapses and outright fraud emerge; however, the refuge that insurance companies were entrusted to provide may not be as embracing as first appears. As insurance CEOs and management teams are paraded before cameras into courtrooms, details about payoffs and kickbacks are disseminated, and financial reporting practices are scrutinized by authorities, public trust in this industry wanes. At best, public perception is tentative in light of recent scandals.

This research is a 6-year extension of Bernardi's (2005) initial ranking of the top ethics authors in accounting; it also represents a broadening of the scope of the original data into accounting's top-40 journals. While Bernardi only considered publications in business-ethics journals in his initial ranking, we developed a methodology to identify ethics articles in accounting's top-40 journals. The purpose of this research is to provide a more complete list of accounting's ethics authors for use by authors, administrators, and other stakeholders. In this study, 26 business-ethics and accounting's top-40 journals were analyzed for a 23-year period between 1986 through 2008. Our data indicate that 16.8 percent of the 4,680 colleagues with either a PhD or DBA who teach accounting at North American institutions had authored/coauthored one ethics article and only 6.3 percent had authored/coauthored more than one ethics article in the 66 journals we examined. Consequently, 83.2 percent of the PhDs and DBAs in accounting had not authored/coauthored even one ethics article.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which New Zealand business web sites conform to the provisions of the New Zealand Privacy Act, 1993 as an articulation of the national values on the rights of individuals to information privacy. The secondary aim is to assess whether adherence to these values might be used as criteria that can reflect on the business integrity of the web site sponsor.

The privacy notices and information‐handling practices of New Zealand business web sites were analysed using a content analysis methodology. The analysis was carried out on a sample of 200 companies, selected at random from a published list of the top 800 companies in New Zealand in 2005. Government web sites were excluded.

The first research hypothesis – that New Zealand business web sites demonstrate awareness of the privacy concerns of customers by posting a privacy notice – was not supported. Similarly, the privacy notices on New Zealand business web sites did not reflect the principles of the New Zealand Privacy Act, 1993 as a basis for establishing “value congruence” with customers. Consequently the use of the principles of the Privacy Act to assess business integrity was not demonstrated sufficiently by the investigation.

The lack of a usable convention for evaluating privacy notices on New Zealand business web sites may lead to a loss of value congruence between businesses and their customers, leading to less‐than‐optimal commercial transactions. The principles of the New Zealand Privacy Act 1993 define the national values and privacy rights of online customers. The use of the Privacy Act to assess the information handling practices of New Zealand businesses online could ensure more ethical business practice, demonstrate business integrity and promote customer confidence.

The use of legislated privacy principles as a reflection of established national values on the rights of citizens could provide a useful measure of value congruence and possibly business integrity. The variety of privacy legislation worldwide reflects a global lack of agreement on acceptable principles. Nevertheless, businesses wishing to establish their integrity and value congruence would be advised to ensure that their web sites provide for the growing sensitivity to privacy issues and the way that personal information is gathered and used online.