The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the effect of implementing shared service centers based on the data obtained from financial statements and a questionnaire survey. Shared service centers provide operational divisions with administrative services. While precedent studies suggest that the centers improve the balance of cost and quality of resource allocation within group companies, results of this event study indicate that, reducing sales, general and administrative costs as well as improving the task quality after shared service centers implementation. In addition, the results show that the types of shared service centers influence the magnitude of these effects.

The 2010 annual meeting of the Japanese Association of Management Accounting was held at the Waseda University from September 3 to 5, 2010. The purposes of this paper are to summarize four reports for presenting the results of their research under the unified theme “Management accounting as a control function”, to put some important discussion points at issue in order, and to formulate a new direction for future research from the perspective of control function in management accounting. Each specific sub-theme of four reporters is “The significance of information systems under internal control regulation” by T. Suzuki, “Comparative institutional analysis of accounting: An analytical viewpoint of control function” by A. Shiiba, “The control framework developed by Henri Bouquin and the latest SAP systems” by Y. Sekiguchi, and “Philosophy and methodology of governance control: From the argument about the internal control” by J. Oshita. Each report was very creative and significant. The useful comments for four reports by commentator T. Yamamoto promoted active panel discussion.

This paper investigates conditions for existence of equilibrium in which a shareholder can derive both business effort and control effort from a management who should be subject to audit under internal control regulation. Given these conditions, I shed light on the significance of business information system and control information system for the shareholder. The main results contain (1)Even though a private cost of business effort increases as a result of the increase of control effort, there exists a favorable equilibrium for the shareholder if an audit cost base is set sufficiently low, (2)When business information system and control information system have about the same precision, the shareholder might prefer to invest in the former, (3)When the regulation is supposed to be tightened, the more severe the regulation is, the more the shareholder could expect preferable effect due to investment in business information system, (4)Even though the audit cost base is supposed to be raised, the shareholder of large company that has precise control information system could compensate the decrease of her expected utility by investing in control information system.

Based on the recent advances in microeconomics literature, particularly contract theory literature, this paper discusses a new perspective to acquire an understanding of accounting: comparative institutional analysis of accounting. The paper argues that this perspective is also useful to gain an insight into accounting control function in organizations. The paper first summarizes recent contract theory literature from the viewpoint of a research methodology in accounting research. Next, it explains how comparative institutional analysis of accounting can provide a valuable perspective for accounting research by examining the use of accounting measures in executive compensation contracts and franchising contracts in convenience store industry. The paper also covers specific studies about comparative institutional analysis of accounting.

The main objectives of this article are 1)to describe the relationship between the control framework developed by Dr. Henri Bouquin and the latest SAP systems (See Figure 1), and 2)to provide the practical resolutions against the issue of separation of duty between the manager. role of control systems and the role of person in charge of operational systems by effectively utilizing the functionality of “SAP BusinessObjects Access Control”.

The basic concept of internal controls which depends on the view of human nature as fundamentally depraved would not be acceptable from auditee． point of view, and I recommended applying the concept of “Se-i-jya-ku” in implementing internal controls so that it would work effectively and meaningfully for its organizations.

In addition, I raised up the potential issues on how to ensure the estimates against the future cash-flow in the era of IFRS from internal control point of view, because that would give a direct impact to the financial statements.

In this paper, a survey of the philosophy and methodology of governance control is provided. At first, two three-layer structures of the same type but with different directions have appeared with the institutionalization of the evaluation of internal control and its auditing as a turning point. The descending three-layer structure of management, control and auditing is a top-down structure, the mechanism of which is traditional management control. The ascending three-layer structure of governance, internal control and internal auditing disciplines and supports the governance mechanism, although this structure is connected with the descending three-layer structure by way of internal control that is a component of the structure. The latter is called “governance control.” Thereafter, two types of governance control philosophy have been proposed. One is the U.S.-type governance control philosophy, the other is the French-type philosophy. Capturing the move to institutionalization through the concept of governance control is an audacious attempt to create a new area for control theory.