The Relationship between the Centralization of Financial Operations and Responsibility Accounting Practices: A Mail Survey of Japanese-Based Multinational Enterprises

Abstract

We conducted a mail survey in order to investigate the relationship between the centralization of financial operations and responsibility accounting practices among Japanese multinational enterprises (MNEs). The centralization of financial operations in this research refers to a set of techniques that aim to maximize the cash flow of the MNEs as a whole, which include leads and lags, matching, netting, re-invoicing, and so on. Although it improves profits of MNEs as a whole, it may hurt the incentive systems of each profit center. Through conducting the analysis of covariance structure from survey data, we derived three hypotheses.