The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of an internal auditor’s activities in Romania, through their specific activities, on ESG reporting and sustainable development goals (SDGs). Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) are three criteria by which an organization’s operations are characterized as sustainable, responsible, or ethical. Even though, for business, the SDGs have been called “a 2030 purchase order for business and government action today”, the alignment between environmental, social, and governance performance and sustainable development goals helps practitioners in observing corporate contributions to sustainable growth. This research aims to identify whether internal auditors in Romania are able to contribute to ESG reporting and the achievement of the sustainable development goals through specific objective assurance and advisory activities. Using the questionnaire, the data were collected from professional accountants who carry out internal audit missions. The main findings confirm a strong and directly significant connection between the internal audit’s perception of the management’s view of the SDGs and how the entity can contribute to achieving the SDG objectives. The results also showed a direct and medium-intensity impact of the variables, capturing the important role of internal audits in ESG reporting. Our study showed that internal audits can help with reporting ESG and sustainable development objectives through their activity. However, according to our statistical results, the internal auditors do not offer at all (or rarely offer) objective assurance and counseling related to these subjects. Moreover, it is observed that, in these situations, the management does not have a clear vision and has not taken measures to achieve the sustainable development goals and ESG factors.

This qualitative study aimed to explore double materiality reporting practices and their impact and financial materiality relevance as well as the disclosure of circularity practices in connection with financial and ESG reporting in the fast fashion industry. Thematic deductive content analysis (TDCA) was performed in five steps on sustainability reports of iconic fast fashion companies, with the aim of identifying recurring disclosure themes and patterns with the help of the NVivo 14 software. The results reveal that strongly addressed topics in the reporting of double materiality are the sustainable and environmentally friendly use of resources and involvement in the community, while the least addressed is employee wellbeing. A strong positive association between double materiality assessment and resource efficiency was found, proving that the efficient use of resources significantly improves environmental performance. Also, circularity innovation shows high correlations with the assessment of environmental impact materiality and governance, highlighting the role of innovation in enhancing overall sustainability. Integrating circular practices into corporate strategies shows that companies performing very well in circularity are most likely to have higher ESG performance in the future. The integrated approach of double materiality and corporate circularity disclosure analysis is highlighted by the connectivity analysis on material financial and ESG reporting and circularity disclosure. Assessing double materiality information requires professional judgment, and mapping the sustainability aspects related to disclosure requirements requires a unitary methodology and a customized list of impact, risks, and opportunities. The study’s implications aim to improve sustainability information reporting and materiality matrix analysis but can also be extended to circular economy regulations.

This study aims to explore the moderating role of corporate governance disclosures on the link between executive board gender diversity and financial performance. Governance disclosures were assessed based on executive managers’ information presented in the companies’ annual reports. The analysis was conducted on Romanian-listed companies from eight industries, covering a time range of ten years. Various robustness tests were used and examined the Blau index apart of the proportion of women managers, as well as different measures for financial performance. The endogeneity issue was solved by the Two-Stage Least Square method and the Generalized Method of Moments. The results revealed that a higher governance disclosure level on executive managers’ characteristics is reflected in increased financial performance. A positive influence was found for the composite financial performance indicator, return on assets, return on equity, and global solvency. Our findings led to the conclusion that the governance disclosure index moderates the relationship between board gender diversity and corporate business performance, and the effect of gender diversity on financial performance will be less positive with a higher level of disclosures on board characteristics. Therefore, managers can filter the quantity and quality of governance disclosure and can monitor the influence of the board’s composition on performance.

This study evaluates the transformative impact of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Cloud Accounting platforms, such as BlackLine, on operational efficiency and professional roles. Using a case study at a Global Multi-Energy Company, the research demonstrates that digitalization yields significant savings, including over 100,000 manual work hours saved annually, and reduces the financial closing cycle by 40%. These advancements facilitate a shift from data processing to strategic analysis, validating the real-time accounting model. While technology enhances financial agility, cultural resistance and cybersecurity risks emerge as primary barriers. Ultimately, the analysis supports the Job Enrichment concept, emphasizing that automation increases work complexity and necessitates an urgent investment in analytical and critical thinking skills for future accounting professionals.

Our multidisciplinary review paper aims to explore the research paradigms of unethical behavior from different academic perspectives. By doing this, our paper contributes to a better understanding of unethical behavior by drawing knowledge from alternative understandings of such behavior. More specifically, our multidisciplinary inquiry aims to summarize the main findings documented by scholars from different disciplines that conducted independent research on the topic using unique perspectives and ideas associated with the field. As such, in order to gain a better understanding of how unethical behavior is examined through a range of different disciplines and areas of research we assessed the highly cited papers found at the intersection of various categories and research areas such as management, business economics, and psychology, ethics, engineering, and environmental sciences and ecology, public environmental occupational health. Having the goal to offer the most representative research on the topic, we based our review on the highly cited papers examining unethical behavior from the Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science (WoS), the world`s leading scientific citation search and analytical information platform. The results show that the highly cited papers analyzed cluster around two major research themes as antecedents and factors increasing/enabling unethical behavior (e.g. propensity of moral disengagement, psychological entitlement, self-serving justifications, job insecurity, air pollution, polluted social contexts, creativity, favorable attitudes of upper-class toward greed, etc.) and factors deterring or limiting it (e.g. religion, ethical leadership). Given our multidisciplinary review, our study helps provide alternative understandings and important insights on the research of unethical behavior to serve for novel investigations in both practice and theory.