Browsing by Subject "investigation"
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Item Disciplined intuition: subjective aspects of judgment and decision making in Child Protective Services(Texas A&M University, 2004-09-30) Daniel, Robert S.This qualitative study was aimed at developing an understanding of how persons involved in the investigation or deliberation of child abuse and neglect cases think and feel about the process of weighing evidence and drawing conclusions from it. Twenty investigators, supervisors, and administrators employed by the Child Protective Services agency in Texas were asked to describe cases they had investigated or reviewed that had been particularly difficult because of conflicting or ambiguous evidence. They were also asked opinion questions about the agency's actuarial risk assessment instrument and the concept of preponderance of evidence. Finally, participants were asked to respond to two short case vignettes describing allegations of sexual abuse. Constant comparative and narrative analysis of interview data revealed that the process of case deliberation in CPS makes use of both intuitive and analytic decision-making styles, and there is a general movement from intuition to analysis as a case ascends the decision-making hierarchy. This movement entails a shift from narrative forms of thought and an outcome-oriented ethic to analytic forms of thought and a rule-based ethic. Though intuitive decision making is at least partly guided from personal experience and personal values, and does produce error because of that, it is nonetheless a form of rationality as capable of being guided by scrupulousness and fidelity to truth as analysis is. The personal value and outcome-oriented ethic that intuition brings to the decision making process not only cannot be eliminated, it is necessary to the program's achievement of its mission. It is recommended that the training of new investigators should, first, acknowledge the large role that intuitive thinking plays in CPS decision making and, second, develop ways to help decision makers discipline intuition, in the words of one participant, and to create conditions that foster its optimal functioning.Item Do More Transparent Corporate Actions Following a Restatement Influence the SEC's Decision to Issue an Enforcement Action?(2010-10-12) Files, Rebecca LynnThis study examines whether corporate transparency about a restatement influences the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) decision to issue an enforcement action. I consider corporate transparency to be higher when firms initiate an independent investigation into the restatement, display the restatement in a more prominent press release location, and/or report the restatement in a more visible SEC filing (i.e., Form 8-K). My sample of restatement observations spans nine years, 1997-2005, and is taken from the databases compiled by the General Accounting Office. For each restatement observation, I hand-collect information on SEC enforcement actions from the SEC's website and information on corporate transparency from company press releases and SEC filings. In order to determine the influence of corporate transparency, I develop a model predicting which restatement firms will be sanctioned by the SEC that includes measures of restatement severity, restatement characteristics, firm characteristics, and all three measures of corporate transparency. I find that, on average, greater restatement transparency increases the likelihood of an SEC sanction. This result is strongest before the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), where all three proxies for corporate transparency are positive and significant predictors of SEC enforcement actions. After SOX, however, more visible SEC filings decrease the likelihood of an SEC sanction, suggesting that the SEC rewards this type of transparent behavior. In addition, the SEC also rewards corporate transparency by reducing monetary penalties when an enforcement action is issued. These results extend prior research (Bowen et al. 2005; Files et al. 2008; Gordon et al. 2008; Myers et al. 2008) by providing the first evidence on how corporate transparency affects the SEC's decision to issue an enforcement action. The results may be useful to managers of restating firms and academics researching SEC enforcement actions.