Incidents where external auditors do not issue a going concern audit opinion (GC opinion) to companies having severe financial problems have been reported globally. This issue motivated this study : (i) to investigate the effect of selected auditor characteristics in terms of specialization, tenure, and fee on GC opinion issuance and (ii) to examine the moderating effect of management's, family's, and institution's influence on the relationship between auditor characteristics and GC opinion issuance. The study involves 644 Malaysian financially distressed listed companies in the period 2006 to 2012. The results of a panel logistic regression analysis show that auditor characteristics have no relationship with GC opinion issuance. Influential management - measured as the level of their ownership - can dampen the positive relationship between auditor specialization and auditor tenure with GC opinion issuance. The presence of an influential family, on the other hand, can strengthen the positive relationship between auditor tenure and GC opinion. No evidence about an influential institution's impact on the GC opinion process could be found. In conclusion, while auditor characteristics do not affect the possibility of a GC opinion issuance, pressure imposed by influential management and family on the auditor during the audit opinion decision process does have an impact.

The objective of the study is to examine perceived Public Account Committee's (PAC) independence from the perspective of PAC members and non-PAC members. The findings indicate that for the PAC to be independence, it should be free from any form of interference from any party when exercising and conducting its responsibilities. The PAC must be free to select any topic or issue to be examined that they think important and involves the public interest. However, being independent can also be seen as a way of gaining political mileage for PAC members and also gives advantages to the opposition members too. Overall, the independence of the PAC is still debatable judging from the decision and action of the government that PAC is seemed to be used as a government tool to cover the activities of the government. The move made by the government in appointing most of its representatives as well as the PAC chairman in the PAC as cabinet members seem to support the claimed that question the independence of the PAC.

Auditors are required to issue going concern opinion (GC opinion) to companies that are incapable to continue their operations in the near future. It is very important for auditors to issue the GC opinion properly because such opinion is the only signal from them on the viability of a company. Investors need such signal before they can make good investment decisions. In Malaysia however, auditors do not want to issue GC opinion to a very large percentage of financially distressed companies. This motivates this paper to discuss the impact of the latest ISA 570 (2016) on GC opinion issuance rate in this country. Overall, we are in the opinion that there is no strong ground to expect the new ISA 570 (2016) to reduce the problem of Malaysian auditors do not issue the GC opinion to many financially distressed companies. This is due to no new stricter measures being introduced in the latest auditing standard. Nonetheless, we propose four actions that can be taken by Malaysian policy makers and standard setters if they want to improve the rate and practice of GC opinion issuance.

This book is written with the aim of providing reading and reference materials of accounting related studies that have been carried out in the Malaysian context. It will not only assist students and young researchers in conducting future research but can also be a source of reference to policymakers, implementer and relevant agencies in designing national policies. This book covers the area of corporate governance, accounting information system, financial reporting, performance measurement system, ethics, internal control and Syari'ah based accounting.

This book consists of eleven selected research in accounting issues, which are looking from Malaysian context. The issues are ranging from attributes of ethical practices as part of management control system and practices, issues related to external auditing and board of directors (BOD) as corporate governance mechanisms, performance management systems design, use and development status, security threats of computerised accounting information system (CAIS) and urgent needs for the knowledge and applications of Syari'ah based Accounting (SbA) as Islamic Capital Market (ICM) is rapidly developing throughtout the world, including Malaysia.