Guiding Professional Accountants to Do the Right Thing

Paul  Healy; V.G.   Narayanan; Penelope  Rossano

Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2015

Guiding Professional Accountants to Do the Right Thing

by Paul Healy, V.G. Narayanan and Penelope Rossano

Abstract

The Ethics Advisory Committee of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) provides training and support for member Chartered Accountants to help them deal with difficult professional situations. Members can seek help through call centers and in-person meetings with accounting experts in the field to discuss how to best handle difficult situations. In addition, the Ethics Advisory Committee meets regularly to identify new issues that raise questions for professional standards. This case examines professional standards for ICAEW Chartered Accountants and a number of challenging ethical situations that members have faced.

Keywords: accounting; ethics; professional conduct;

Language: English

Format: Print

11 pages

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Citation:

Healy, Paul, V.G. Narayanan, and Penelope Rossano. "Guiding Professional Accountants to Do the Right Thing." Harvard Business School Case 115-028, March 2015.

We use time-driven activity-based costing to estimate the cost of personnel and space for an elective coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery at two U.S. hospitals, Intermountain and Baylor Heart, and Narayana Health (NH), in India. All three hospitals use modern management methods to achieve excellent patient outcomes. We use variance analysis to remove the effect of differential prices paid for personnel and space at the three hospitals. NH, even at US price levels, retains a cost advantage over the two US hospitals by shifting tasks to less-credentialed and/or less-experienced personnel, supervised by highly-skilled personnel, a practice facilitated by NH’s high annual CABG volume. NH offsets some of its task downshifting cost savings by having lower-skilled employees spend more time counseling patients and their families for in-hospital and home recovery. NH’s cost-saving practices could be captured by US hospitals by relaxing hospital and health professional licensing regulations, encouraging greater family participation in inpatient care, and performing complex surgeries in high-volume regional centers of excellence.

Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2020

The Board's Role in Refocusing Bahrain Development Bank

Paul M. Healy and Alpana Thapar

In March 2016, Bahrain Development Bank’s (BDB) existing board term came to an end and Khalid Al Rumaihi was appointed the new chairman. Determining a need for change, he immediately overhauled the board and replaced BDB’s long-standing CEO. The new board quickly concluded that BDB needed to refocus on its core business of lending to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and selected an experienced Bahraini corporate banker to implement this strategy. However, within six months, the new CEO resigned and the board had to once again look for a replacement. Expanding their search globally, they found Sanjeev Paul, a Singaporean with immense experience in SME lending, who was appointed CEO of BDB in May 2018. Over the next 20 months, with the board’s support, Paul headed an organization-wide revamp aimed at enabling the bank to refocus and achieve its mandate of supporting SMEs. By December 2019, the changes started to pay off; after three years of losses, BDB turned its first profit. However, Paul and the board recognized their work was far from over. BDB’s cost structure was higher than that of competition, they paid below-market salaries, and had an outdated core banking system. As Al Rumaihi looked ahead to his second term as chair, he wondered how the board could help Paul and his management team in addressing these challenges.

Keywords: board of directors; Governing and Advisory Boards; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Change Management; Banking Industry; Bahrain;

Citation:

Healy, Paul M., and Alpana Thapar. "The Board's Role in Refocusing Bahrain Development Bank." Harvard Business School Case 120-099, April 2020. View Details

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Concerns about high rates of government corruption in resource-rich countries have led transparency advocates to urge oil and gas firms to disclose payments to host governments for natural resources. Transparency, they argue, can increase government accountability and mitigate corruption. However, we find a low frequency of voluntary disclosures of payments by oil and gas firms and negative stock price reactions for affected firms at the announcement of regulations mandating disclosure. This suggests that sample firm managers and their investors perceive that such disclosures generate private costs, despite any public benefits. We document that industry self-regulation has generated information to substitute for the gap in voluntary company disclosure and that such disclosures are accompanied by lower country corruption ratings. This suggests that collective action could be an effective way for companies to manage the private costs of disclosure and respond to public pressure for transparency that could provide public benefits.

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Guiding Professional Accountants to Do the Right Thing

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