lester company has been offered a five year contract to provide component parts for a larg

The IFAC code of professional ethics (2009), adopted as being relevant to ACCA members and students, contains the following advice.

‘A professional accountant in business or an immediate or close family member may be offered an inducement. Inducements may take various forms, including gifts, hospitality, preferential treatment, and inappropriate appeals to friendship or loyalty. Offers of inducements may create threats to compliance with the fundamental principles [of professionalism].’

Executive director and qualified accountant Ann Koo was in charge of awarding large outsourcing contracts for a large public listed company. When her family fell into debt, she looked for a way to make some additional income. When her company was seeking to place a contract for a large outsourced service, without inviting other tenders from which to select, she accepted a bid from one supplier who said it would pay her $50,000 as a ‘thank you’ once the contract was awarded. She justified her behaviour by reminding herself that she obtained her job partly because she was an accountant and that she had worked extremely hard to obtain her accounting qualification. She believed she was entitled to make a ‘higher personal return’ on her investment of time and effort in her accountancy training and through successful qualification as a professional accountant.

Required: (a) Briefly describe the five types of ethical threats in the IFAC code of professional ethics (2009) and discuss how accepting excessive ‘gifts’ or ‘hospitality’ can give rise to some of these threats within this case. (9 marks)

(b) Criticise Ann Koo’s beliefs and behaviour, and explain why accepting the $50,000 conflicts with her duty to uphold the public interest. (10 marks)

(c) The IFAC code also highlights the need for: ‘up-to-date education [for directors] on ethical issues and the legal restrictions and other regulations around potential insider trading.’

Required:

Explain what ‘insider dealing/trading’ is and why it is an unethical and often illegal practice. (6 marks)

It is very difficult to prove today that a painting done two or three hundred years ago, especially one without a signature or with a questionably authentic signature, is indubitably the work of this or that particular artist. This fact gives the traditional attribution of a disputed painting special weight, since that attribution carries the presumption of historical continuity. Consequently, an art historian arguing for a deattribution will generally convince other art historians only if he or she can persuasively argue for a specific reattribution. Which one of the following, if true, most strongly supports the position that the traditional attribution of a disputed painting should not have special weight?

A．Art dealers have always been led by economic self-interest to attribute any unsigned paintings of merit to recognized masters rather than to obscure artists.

B．When a painting is originally created, there are invariably at least some eyewitnesses who see the artist at work, and thus questions of correct attribution cannot arise at that time.

C．There are not always clearly discernible differences between the occasional inferior work produced by a master and the very best work produced by a lesser talent.

D．Attribution can shape perception inasmuch as certain features that would count as marks of greatness in a master"s work would be counted as signs of inferior artistry if a work were attributed to a minor artist.

E．Even though some masters had specialists assist them with certain detail work, such as depicting lace, the resulting works are properly attributed to the masters alone.

A new company has been given one public IP address. The company employs 200 users requiring Internet access from the headquarters.Which of the following can be implemented to provide Internet access for all the employees?（）

A. Multicasting

B. Proxy server

C. NAT

D. Subnetting

American Dreams

There is a common response to America among foreign writers:the US is a land of extremes where the best of things qre just as easily found as the worst.This is a cliche(陈词滥调).

In the land of black and white,people should not be too surprised to find some of the biggest gaps between the rich and the poor in the world.But the American Dream offers a way out to everyone.(46) No class system or govemment stands in the way.

Sadly,this old argument is no longer true.Over the past few decades there has been a fundamental shift in the structure of the American economy.

The gap between the rich and the poor has widened and widened.(47)

Over the past 25 years the median US family income has gone up 18 per cent.For the top 1 per cent,however,it has gone up 200 per cent.Twenty-five years ago the top fifth of Americans had an average income 6.7 times that of the bottom fifth.(48)

Inequalities have grown worse in different regions.In California,incomes for lower class families have fallen by 4 per cent since 1969.(49) This has led to an economy hugely in favor of a small group of very rich Americans.The wealthiest 1 per cent of households now control a third of the national wealth.There are now 37 million Americans living in poverty.At 12.7 per cent of the population,it is the highest percentage in the developed world.

Yet the tax burden on America’s rich is falling,not growing.(50) There was an economic theory holding that the rich spending more would benefit everyone as a whole.But clearly that theory has not worked in reality.

A.Nobody is poor in the US.

B.The top 0.01 per cent of households has seen its tax bite fall by a full 25 percentage points since 1980.

C.For upper class families they have risen 41 per cent.

D.Now it is 9.8 times.

E.As it does so,the possibility to cross that gap gets smaller and smaller.

F.All one has to do is to work hard and climb the ladder towards the top.