The Impact of Sustainable Financial Data Governance, Political Connections, and Creative Accounting Practices on Organizational Outcomes

Decision-making and financial information quality are key facets of corporate sustainability. The literature is devoid of inquiries investigating the collective impact of sustainable financial data governance and political connections on creative accounting practices, the quality of financial reporting and decision-making effectiveness. The present study integrates these critical factors by obtaining survey data (n = 180) from publicly listed firms in Amman Stock Exchange, Jordan. By applying partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), this study found that (i) sustainable financial data governance does not influence creative accounting practices, (ii) political connections influences the level of firms creative accounting practices, (iii) creative accounting practices influences the quality of financial and accounting information reporting, and (iv) the quality of financial and accounting information reporting influences firms decision-making effectiveness. Implications, limitations, and future research courses are discussed.


Introduction
Sustainable action and decision are required for progressive development of firms in the long-run. For this to be achieved, some level of corporate governance is required, e.g., corporate-wide governance or specific context such as IT or data governance. IT governance denote the distribution of decision-making rights and the responsibilities of stakeholders about IT usage within a firm [1]. Firms are heavily investing in big data analytics (i.e., technologies for data storage, analysis, and visualization) to gain a competitive advantage. Proponents of data governance have argued that it can result in competitive performance and success [2], firm sensing, seizing, and transforming capabilities [3]. Scholars have commented on the potential benefits and drawbacks of big data, big data analytics, and its governance in finance and accounting field [4,5]. Sustainable data governance in the context of finance and accounting is defined as the ability of firms to engage in information acquisition, retention, analysis, and insight extraction. The ability of firms to obtain, store, analyze, and report data based on need can empower and equip them with greater flexibility toward creative accounting practices. However, investigations on sustainable financial data governance and organizational outcomes are scarce in the literature.
The Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) is established in 1999 to govern, manage, and develop the operations and activities of securities, commodities, and derivatives markets inside and outside Jordan. As a non-profit independent institution, ASE was authorized to function as a regulated market for trading securities in Jordan. For instance, to ensure free interaction of supply and demand forces and fair-trading practices [6]. The market capitalization of the listed firms in ASE constitute of more than 70% of the GDP. However, in 2017, ASE became a public owned institution under the name "The Amman Stock Exchange Company (ASE Company)". According to Al-Tal [7], "the efficiency of ASE company appears to have been hindered by its regulatory structure and institutional constraints. One, the ASE institutional structure strengthens the government control over the ASE financial autonomy. Two, families and government official have dominant control, making it hard to dictate what corporate governance rules are required, which then prevent some listed companies from complying.
For example, in 2008 ASE suffered sustained losses where the trade volume dropped to almost 88%. ASE chairman Dr. Jawad Al-Anani stressed that the financial market is on the verge of bankruptcy and called for radical reforms. He also added corruption, politization, and manipulations among public shareholding companies were the root of the problem and called for the government and legislator to adopt a level of seriousness [8]. One scenario is the Jordanian Phosphate Company that was privatized due to series of corruption allegations ranging from lack of financial disclosure and manipulations. Moreover, at the time of privatization, the top management teams comprise of individuals mostly from politically connected tribes and families. In 2005, the company had an account amounting to 9 million Jordanian Dinars (JD). The "price of the share at the sale was 2.35 JD, after the privatization, the company's cumulative profits doubled from 273,500 million JD in the period (1953, the year of incorporation of the company to 2005), to 575,900 million JD in 2006. The value of the stock increased to 8.45 dinars in 2010" [9].
Another scenario is a company that was dismissed from ASE and subsequently dissolved. As such not included in this study's sample. The Board of Directors of Spinning and Weaving Company was dissolved, and the firm was unlisted from ASE after financial corruption and embezzlement of about 100 million JD was uncovered. Consequently, the firm became under the control of Industry and Trade Ministry. Several arrests were made including the general manager, the sales manager, procurement manager and other senior officials. Back in 1996, one investor filed a lawsuit against the company's management accusing it of violating the conditions stipulated in Agreement signed between the parties. A committee from the ministry of Industry and Trade was charged with auditing the company's books and entries to ensure the financial and administrative status of the company. The records show evidence of creative accounting meant to hide corruption practices, all in all this activities and practices helped the company to hide losses in revenue. The minister was quoted as saying the company, which was making annual profits of more than two million JD, began to suffer huge losses accrued to 10 million JD [10].
Three, a lack of coordination, data sharing and functional overlaps between officials of the various regulatory bodies makes it hard to monitor financial disclosures and activities of firms. Jordan Securities Commission (JSC) is responsible for compliance with filing and disclosure enforcement but does not extensively review the quality of financial statements due to functional overlap. In 2004, as a part of the joint World Bank-IMF program, the Report of Observance of Standards and Codes (ROSC) assessed Jordan's corporate governance policy framework and accounting compliance practices. The ROSC Report [11] recommends several policies, such as developing a Code of Corporate Governance, enforcement of public financial disclosure, and periodic review of financial reports and contents, greater compliance with the OECD principles, and a continual review of regulatory bodies that oversee corporate governance. The report also showed that less than 40% of listed firms make a high-quality disclosure [11]. In sum, these issues highlight the presence or partial presence of selective governance, politicized regulations, and the potentiality of creative accounting and lack of financial disclosure. This study set forth to unveil and uncover the true situation on ground.
In the context of this study, we defined political connections as the strength of social and political networks of key corporate or organizational members (i.e., CEO, CFO, Directors etc.). The strength of this network allows firms to gain favors, contracts, timely information, scarce resources, etc. Empirical evidence showed that political connections is costly for firms as it diminishes the accuracy of financial predictions, lowers the quality accounting information [12], misleads firms into risky projects [13], and lowers return on assets due to overinvestments [14]. Politically connected firms are more likely to complete a cross-border transaction than their unconnected counterparts, but at the cost of poorer performance [15]. Advocates have argued that politically connected firms are more likely to be innovative due to government subsidies [16], have abundant disposable resources, and are likely to be top performers [17]. The conflict in the literature suggests that more research is needed to examine the relevance of political connections for creative accounting, quality of accounting reports, and decision-making effectiveness.
Large corporations in developed and developing countries are hit by accounting scandals (e.g., WorldCom and Enron). These scandals do not only affect the focal firms, but also the national and global economy. Griffiths [18] lamented that the legitimate and biggest con trick since the Trojan horse, is creative accounting. Creative accounting practices can be viewed as a form of "fictitious revenue", "aggressive capitalization and extended amortization policies", "misreported assets and liabilities", "getting creative with the income statement", and "problems with cash flow reporting" [19]. The motive is to misguide the public by hiding the real financial situation of firms [20]. In this paper, we defined creative accounting practices as the deliberate withholding of a firm's real financial status and engagement with financial disclosure management to portray the desired financial status.
Existing research on political connections [14,[21][22][23], creative accounting practices [24][25][26], and the quality of financial reporting [12,24,27,28] mostly relies on secondary data, which largely does not have the appropriate information due to utilization of proxy variables. Consequently, secondary data has a high level of biasness and lack of control over data quality [29,30]. Moreover, a majority of these researches were mostly conducted in Western nations and Asian countries like China. Primary data are generally criticized for their subjective nature but can provide down-to-earth information. To provide in-depth and direct insights, the present study utilized primary data, which somehow interrogates existing work and provides fresh insights from an Arabian setting, specifically Jordan.
A handful of papers have linked corporate governance with creative accounting practices [26,[31][32][33]. But, to the best of the author(s) knowledge, no research has linked sustainable financial data governance with creative accounting practices. Further, the deleterious effects of financial reporting have been mentioned by prior researchers (e.g., [25,28,34]). Surprisingly, the consequences of poor-quality reporting have been widely overlooked in the literature. To provide a complete frame of reference, the current study examines the collective impacts of sustainable financial data governance and political connections on creative accounting practices. The study also examines how creative accounting practices impact the quality of financial reporting and the effects of quality of financial reporting on the decision-making effectiveness of firms.

Literature Review and Hypotheses
Decision-making effectiveness "is the degree to which a decision achieves the objectives established by management at the time it is made" ( [35], p. 372). Wixom et al. [36] believed that decision-making effectiveness can be attained by boosting the speed of a decision, whereas Cao et al. [37] believed that decision-making effectiveness is contingent upon organizational in-depth understanding of their stakeholders (clients/suppliers and competitors). More recently, Wang and Byrd [38] further explained that the quality of information used by firms can directly or indirectly boost managements decision-making effectiveness. Accounting and financial information that are low in quality are characterized by high manipulative practices and are sentiments of opportunistic behavior [27]. These practices are borne out of the desire for creative accounting practices, e.g., tax avoidance, high bonus, inflated share prices, and others. In this view, the quality of accounting data can influence the decision-making ability of managers. For instance, the quality of financial information and its level of disclosure may lower the quality and transparency of firms, which impedes the effectiveness of decisions.
The terminology creative accounting "is neither found in any accounting standards or regulations nor the procedures for its practices stated" [24]. This opens a room that is full of dilemma, debate, and argument. According to Barnea et al. [39], "creative accounting practices involves deliberate dampening of fluctuations about "some level of earnings considered to be normal for the firm". Schipper [40] said it is equals to "disclosure management", "in the sense of a purposeful intervention in the financial reporting processes". Merchant and Rockness [41] added that it is any attempt by the management to alter income level, which provides no true economic advantage to the organization. Other scholars defined it as "the process of manipulating accounting figures by taking advantage of the loopholes in accounting rules and the choices of measurement and disclosure practices in them to transform financial statements from what they should be to what preparers would prefer to see reported, and the process by which transactions are structured, so as to produce the required accounting results rather than reporting transactions in a neutral and consistent way" ( [42], p. 59).
Theses manipulations and distortions arise from corporate governance which connects the dots between corporations and their stakeholders, e.g., employees, customers, suppliers, community, board of directors, shareholders, lenders, etc. [43]. Similar arguments were echoed by researchers that corruption resulting from poor corporate governance can be associated with managerial misconduct, account, and financial reporting manipulation [44]. Corruption is a key issue in entrepreneurship, particularly in emerging economies such as Jordan. From an accounting viewpoint, corruption may manifest through financial and accounting reporting, i.e., deliberately give a false picture of accounts [44]. Corporate governance is not just a determinant, but also a safeguard for creative accounting, because corporate governance is seen as the system by which the business is directed and controlled [45]. A recent study shows that corporate governance and ethical values are predictors of creative accounting and reliable accounting reporting [26]. The emergence of information technology transformed accounting scandals into perpetual forms, which is an outcome of corporate governance. Whittington [46] concluded that corporate governance may be a necessary condition for reduced creative accounting and improved financial reporting, but may not be sufficient. Consequently, there is a lack of study examining how firms take advantage of technology for creative accounting purposes; more specifically, sustainable financial data governance.
Sustainable financial data governance denotes practices of "creating, obtaining, valuating, storing, using, updating, controlling, accessing, archiving, and/or deleting" of financial and accounting information over its life cycle. The goal of these practices is to "magnify the potential value of information to the firm by ensuring data quality, control, and to protect information so that its value to the organization is not lost" [2,3,47]. Griffin and Wright [4] stated that data and its governance has fundamentally changed the way accounting data is interpreted and reported. More subtly, it allows firms to utilize external data for future events prediction [5]. Traditional corporate governance was found to be an accelerator for the quality of accounting information and a decelerator of creative accounting activities [32]. Sustainable financial data governance comprises of data queries, statistical and analytical practices, which allow firms to collect, store, and manipulate, report and visualize data according to their need. In this line of reasoning, firms with higher levels of sustainable financial data governance are more likely to engage in creative accounting practices, because such sophisticated tools support their manipulative and opportunistic behaviors. The grassroots of creative accounting practices stem from resource sharing conflicts between stakeholders. For instance, directors and managers are striving to pay lesser taxes and dividends. Shareholders are striving to earn high dividends, and employees are only interested in higher salaries, while local government focus is on how to collect more taxes. Aside from the above said antecedents, there are other factors (i.e., "legal structure supporting inconclusive prosecution", "lack of professional ethical structures", "political insulations and connectedness") that motivate fabrication, distortion, and misstatements of firms accounting reports [22,24]. Political connection is a double-edged sword. On the front side, politically connected firms have disposable resources such as low rate bank loans, government subsidies, tax cuts, supportive government policies and regulations [17,21]. On the dark side, politically connected firms are more likely to engage in tax evasion, financial fraud, and opportunistic behaviors because of the political trade-off and legal insulations they possess. According to Jia, Mao and Yuan [48], political connections gives firm legislative advantages, and also to shield their top management from litigation risk, e.g., prosecution. Politically connected family firms were found to deploy creative accounting to inflate their revenues [49]. In this view, firms whose top managements have political connections are more likely to engage in creative accounting practices.

Hypotheses 2 (H2): Political Connections Has a Positive Impact on Creative Accounting Practices.
Creative accounting practices can be found both at the micro and macro level (i.e., national economy). At macro-level national governments used these practices to implement "cosmetic measures" and then to keep the budget deficits under certain national or international standards (e.g., Maastricht criteria of European Union) as noted in [20]. At the micro-level, firms use these practices to prevent the public from seeing the true financial state of a company, by showing a steady trend of growth in profit rather than volatile profits, e.g., rising and falling growth [50]. Managers must resolve competing conflicts between stakeholders. Creative accounting practices provides managers the opportunity to manipulate and misrepresent financial activities and transactions [42,51] to resolve these conflicts, which happen for several reasons. One, top management pressures accounting managers to overestimate the financial state of their companies [27,52]. Two, managers manipulate accounting and financial information to maximize their earnings. Three, shareholders benefits from these manipulative practices in terms of increase in the value of their shares. Creative accounting practices are a source of self-destruction for firms in the Chinese manufacturing industry, in that false disclosure in financial statements of the debt are misleading [41,53]. These accounting engineering approaches help firms to create the desired public image and/or to portrait financial performance according to certain preferences by exploiting legislative ambiguity. These practices tend to reduce the quality of financial data reporting. In this view, firms with a high level of creative accounting practices are more likely to have poor or low quality financial and accounting reporting. Interestingly, firms are projected with better earnings, high financial performance, shares, and stock prices as a result of creative accounting practices [54]. These practices are not illegal nor break the law; rather, they use ambiguities within legislation to portray firms' financial standings according to preferences [20]. In sum, these practices are designed to overestimate the financial situation of firms and economies, which may result in poor quality financial and accounting reporting. Annual financial reports are published with the aim to provide public data on cash flows, financial position, and performance of a company. Research shows that these data are useful to a wide range of users (i.e., private and public entities) in making economic decisions [25]. For example, financial statements have been shown to affect SME owner's decision effectiveness [4], and it is also used to assess the overall health of family firms and guides decision makers [55,56]. Fuchs, Bergmann, and Brusca [57] added that accrual accounting reforms on financial reporting is a prerequisite instrument for sound decisions. Pijper [28] added that the quality of financial and accounting reporting is a strong determinant for decision-making, and this chain has been expounded by Tee, Yee, and Chong [23], who argued that firms with strong political connections are likely to experience stock price crash risk or shocks. Politically connected firms are prone to use creative accounting practices, which is likely to reduce the quality of annual reports and firms with limited knowledge of their financial standings, and situations are more likely to make wrong decisions. In this view, the quality of financial and accounting reporting is likely to enhance the effectiveness of managerial decisions.

Data Collection and Sample
The present study employed a quantitative approach to examine the proposed structural relationships, which suit the principles of structural equation modeling (SEM). SEM is a powerful multivariate analysis technique that includes correlation analysis, causal modeling, or path analysis, etc. Multivariate data were obtained through adapted survey items, which were originally in English. Thus, two professional translators back-translated the text from English to Arabic and vice versa.
A pretest was carried out and no further changes were made. Next, the managements of the listed firms were contacted to participate in the survey. According to the information obtained from Amman Stock Market in 2019, there are 192 listed firms, and 189 firms agreed to participate in the study. Five (5) CFOs withdrew their consent for participation due to meetings and other commitments, and four (4) stopped responding to the survey citing the level of information sensitivity. The researcher visited each firm and asked the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), or in some cases the deputy or acting CFO, to respond to the survey. Some of the participating CFOs were allowed to keep the questionnaire with them to fill it out at a more convenient time and subsequently returned it. This informal approach enhances the reception rate, quality of data, and eventually leads to reliable results [58,59]. The CFOs were briefed about the purpose of the research and were subsequently assured that the obtained information would not be disclosed to third parties and only be used for research purposes. Prior work has shown that this strategy can mitigate common method bias, as well as social desirability biases [60,61]. The data-garnering process lasted 2 months, and only 180 valid forms were obtained and subsequently used for analysis.

Measures
"Sustainable financial data governance" is the capacity of firms to acquire, store, and manipulate big data richness and combine it with real-time data to make forecast future events such as demand, fluctuations, price adjustment, etc. This construct is conceptualized with three dimensions namely structural, procedural and relational governance practices [3] and operationalized with 9 scale items. "Political connections" measures top management tendency to enjoy legal protection provided by their political capital and support. The construct was operationalized with 4 scale items developed by imitating [48] work. "Creative accounting practices" was operationalized with 13 scale items adopted from prior work [51]. "Quality of financial reporting was operationalized with 5 scale items adopted from prior work [51]. Decision-making effectiveness" is the ability of firms to make effective and accurate decisions as a result of external forces. The construct was operationalized with 3 scale items adopted from prior work [38]. The response options were anchored on a seven-point Likert scale where 1 = "strongly disagree" and 7 = "strongly agree". The measures are reported in the Appendix A section.
Demographic information such as firm age, firm size measure by the number of employees, and the operational industry. Approximately 43.3% of the firms have more than 250 employees, 40.6% have between 51 and 250 employees, and the rest have less than 50 employees. An overwhelming number of the firms (66.7%) are in the service industry; 25% operate in the manufacturing industry; 4.4% in hotel and hospitality industry; 2.8% in oil, gas and mining industry and the rest are in IT and telecommunication industry. Regarding firm age, 47.8% have been in operation for more than 10 years; 47.2% between 6 and 10 years; and the rest between 1 and 5 years.

PLS-SEM Analysis
PLS-SEM technique was used to examine the model of interest. The reliability coefficients (i.e., alpha and composite reliability (CR)), convergent (i.e., standardized factor coefficients of the items, their t-statistics, average variance extracted (AVE)), and divergent validity (i.e., Fornell-Larcker criterion and Heterotrait-monotrait (HTMT) ratio) were assessed. The research items with low and insignificant standardized factor loadings were eliminated. Figure 1 shows that the loadings of the retained items exceeded the benchmark of 0.50 and Figure 2 shows that the items loadings are statistically significant [62,63]. Composite reliability and Cronbach's alpha were evaluated to gauge for internal consistency of the scale items, for each construct the value exceeded 0.7, the widely accepted benchmark [64], and each construct exhibited an AVE that is above the benchmark of 0.5 [64,65]. In sum, this outcome suggests the evidence of reliability and convergent validity of the instruments. As for discriminant validity, HTMT-ratio and The Fornell-Larcker criterion were evaluated. HTMT-ratio of correlation were below the threshold of 0.9 [66] and AVEs were higher than the squared inter-construct correlations [65]. In sum, this outcome suggests the evidence of divergent validity of the instruments. See Table 1. Table 1. Reliability, convergent, and divergent validity.     As for the hypothesized relationships, results from PLS-SEM show that sustainable financial data governance did not significantly influence creative accounting practices (β = 0.151, ρ = 0.411). Hence, Hypothesis 1 was rejected. Political connections significantly influence creative accounting practices in the positive direction (β = 0.542, ρ = 0.000) and explains 35% of the variance in creative accounting practices. Hence, hypothesis 2 was accepted. Creative accounting practices significantly influences the quality of financial reporting in the positive direction (β = 0.351, ρ = 0.018) and explains 12% of the variance in quality of financial reporting. Hence, hypothesis 3 was rejected because we projected a negative relationship. The quality of financial reporting significantly influenced the decision-making effectiveness in the positive direction (β = 0.494, ρ = 0.000) and explains 24% of the variance in quality of financial reporting. Hence, hypothesis 4 was accepted. See Figures 1 and 2 for further details. In sum, Table 2 reports the accepted and rejected hypotheses.

Post-Hoc Analysis
Although the mediating roles of creative accounting practices and quality of financial reporting on the association between political connections and decision-making effectiveness was not hypothesized, the present study test for mediation effects using bootstrapping analysis with a bias-corrected confidence interval that resamples the original sample to n = 5000. Bootstrapping uses simulation to resample and make inferences about the population of interest. More subtly, bootstrapping treats a given sample as the population [67]. The outcome of bootstrapping analyses revealed serial mediation effects of creative accounting practices and quality of financial reporting on the link between political connections and decision-making effectiveness (β = 0.094, ρ = 0.035), with these intervals (Bias = −0.003; 2.5% = −0.030; 97.5% = 0.165). The result shows that creative accounting practices and quality of financial reporting do not mediate the link between sustainable financial data governance and decision-making effectiveness because of the insignificant effect of sustainable financial data governance on creative accounting practices.

Discussion
The association between sustainable financial data governance, political connections, and creative accounting practices have been underexplored in the literature, especially in Arabian countries. This paper provides substantial insights into the field by examining how sustainable financial data governance and political connections specifically contribute to creative accounting practices. In doing so, this work also sheds new light on the drivers of quality of financial reporting and decision-making effectiveness by assessing the role of creative accounting practices.
Contrary to our prediction, sustainable financial data governance did not significantly influence creative accounting practices. Prior studies show that good corporate governance and ethical value can minimize creative accounting practices and increase performance [26,31,33,68]. However, in the context of this study that focuses on sustainable financial data governance, such practices did not inhibit nor foster creative accounting practices. First, it might be that accounting and finance departments are less involved in sustainability management in comparison to all other corporate functions [69]. This unexpected finding demands further research consideration in future scholarly work.
Second, political connections significantly influence creative accounting practices. The present finding is in line with existing assertions. For example, Jia et al. [48] showed that the managers of politically connected firms are shielded from legal prosecutions, and such firms are less likely to purchase insurance in emerging and developing countries. Bona-Sánchez et al. [49] argued that politically connected firms tend to have more process innovation, and that logically creative accounting innovation is an inclusive category [16]. Previous research exploring the link between political connections and creative accounting practices has not considered primary data and contextual factors, e.g., Jordan. This paper filled the void by scrutinizing and validating these associations.
Third, creative accounting practices positively and significantly influence the quality of financial reporting, and this outcome contradicts our prediction. Past empirical assertions show that creative accounting can affect the reliability of financial reports [26] or result in unfair reporting of the firm's operations [24]. Creative accounting resulting from political connectedness may further give birth to poor financial and accounting reporting standards [12,21]. Prior work that examines the associations between creative accounting practices and the quality of financial reporting has provided mixed results (positive and negative). For instance, creative accounting practices can activate unethical and opportunistic behaviors, potentially counteracting the favorable view and usage of creative accounting practices [27]. The findings in this paper provide support for the positive stream, suggesting that creative accounting practices do not always activate self-serving or immorality among managers.
And fourth, quality of financial reporting significantly influences decision-making effectiveness. The present finding is in line with existing assertions. For example, it was reported by an earlier study that accrual accounting reforms on financial reporting has great tendency to support and materialize accurate and reliable decisions [28,[55][56][57]. This study extended and provided contribution from an Arabian cultural setting. To wrap up, we observe the dynamic mechanisms by which political connections foster creative accounting practices, which in turn results in (low or high) quality of financial reporting and subsequently affects decision-making effectiveness. We found that creative accounting practices and quality of financial reporting fully mediate the relationship between political connections and decision-making effectiveness.

Implications for Theory and Practice
The findings of this study have several important implications. First, although the relationship between sustainable financial data governance and creative accounting practices is insignificant, studies in this research stream recommended firms to practice good corporate governance to diminish the level of creative accounting practices [33]. This paper also recommends the use of sustainable financial data governance within legal boundaries. Second, politically connected firms are more likely to engage in creative accounting practices, which in turn may lead to unwanted organizational outcomes. For instance, firms that are politically connected are likely to overinvest (e.g., hire more employees, donations, and increase capital expenditures to stimulate GDP) to serve the interests of political allies. Our recommendation is that governments force firms to use consistent accounting methods for at least one or two years, as such a limitation may reduce the backdoors used in creative accounting. Third, creative accounting seems to boost the propensity of both good and/or poor financial reporting. Firms that want accurate and reliable financial and accounting information should minimize the use of creative accounting, or at least control the activities of top managements by using external auditors. Additionally, national governments should strive to block the potholes in the legislation to diminish the tendency of creative accounting.
Fourth, information has been shown to be a valuable ingredient for decision-making [70,71]. Therefore, firms are encouraged to do more in terms of underreporting and/or omittance of useful data for the sake of creative accounting, as this may later backfire. And lastly, accounting ethical codes serves as important remedies to cope with creative accounting practices [20]. For example, government and other public parastatals should encourage firms such as "Muddy Waters" that focused on detecting "creative accounting/fraudulent method but with strict controls to avoid biases. Our results provide additional reasons as to why steps should be taken to minimize the occurrence of political support for firms. The plausible reason is that legal shield of political; connected firms can result in scandals through creative accounting; inaccurate and poor financial reporting, which in turn affects both micro-and macro-economic policies and decisions. Based on the outcome of this study, compliance of technical standards, public interest consideration, and the use of ethical codes in the accounting profession may impede and unshielded the protection offer by political connections, which in turn reduces the tendency of creative accounting and enhances quality of reporting and effectiveness of decision-making.

Limitations and Future Research Course
This article inherits several method caveats. First, only publicly listed firms in Jordan were considered, this limits generalizability of the findings. Second, the oriental culture of Jordan, legal structure, and limited resources may have profound effects in terms of political connections and the related outcomes. Future research may test similar associations in other national and cultural settings, especially affluent nations with abundant resources and advanced regulations. Third, the cross-sectional design, single data source and self-reported design limits our ability to draw conclusions on causal inference. Future studies may consider the use of longitudinal and mixed-method approaches [61], and artificial intelligence techniques [72]. A fruitful research avenue that future research can harvest would be to examine the moderating impact of legal regulations and transparency on the link between political connections, creative accounting practices, and quality of financial reporting. That is, do established legal regulations and high transparency lower this effect? Funding: This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Conflicts of Interest: The authors have no conflict of interest.
Appendix A Table A1. Psychometric properties of the measurement instruments.

Sustainable Financial Data Governance
Structural Practices "In our organization, we have identified key IT and non-IT decision makers to have the responsibility regarding financial data ownership, value analysis and management" "In our organization, we use steering committees to oversee and assess financial data values and costs" Procedural Practices -In our organization, we have controlled practices regarding financial data management in terms of ___________________ "Setting retention policies (e.g., Time to live) of data" "Backup routines" "Establishing/monitoring access (e.g., User access) to data" "Classifying data according to value" "Monitoring costs versus value of data" Relational Practices-In our organization, we ___________________ "Educate users and non-IT managers regarding financial data storage, utilization and costs" "Develop communications regarding policy effectiveness and user" Political Connections "Members of our top management team have held top government, military or political posts in the past" "Members of our top management team hold active political posts" "Members of our top management team shares strong ties with members of the parliament and/or national congress" "Members of our top management team enjoy legal protection due to their ties with political entities" Quality of financial reporting "Environmental liability recognized for the first time are usually debited to accumulated profit" "in our financial reports provision for warranty costs are recognized (r)" "In our financial reports, impairment loss on asset are recognized (r)" "Restructuring provision are incorrectly recognized as a liability at acquisition date (r)" "in our financial reports, revenues are recognized before installation completed" Note: r denotes reverse scored questions. Table A2. Psychometric properties of the measurement instruments.

Instruments
Creative Accounting Practices "Our organization use creative accounting practices to meet analysts' profit expectations" "Our organization use creative accounting practices to meet directors' earnings forecasts" "Our organization use creative accounting practices because it is repurchasing own shares" "Our organization use creative accounting practices to reflect managers and board members' holding share options" "Our organization use creative accounting practices to reflect managers' bonuses based on profits" "Our organization use creative accounting practices to avoid reporting a loss or slowdown in growth" "Our organization use creative accounting practices to reflect the existence of debt covenants e.g., adjustment to match economic situations" "Our organization use creative accounting practices to reflect high institutional ownership e.g., turnover and opportunistic behavior of CEO, executive directors and managers" "Our organization use creative accounting practices because firms constantly making losses are not likely to manage earnings upwards" "Our organization use creative accounting practices to reflect high growth rate" "Our organization use creative accounting practices because of absence of audit committee" "Our organization use creative accounting practices because of poor outside director representation" "Our organization use creative accounting practices because board of directors nominated by top management" Decision-making Effectiveness "The quality of decisions has improved with the use of financial data governance" "The speed at which we analyze decisions has increased with the use of financial data governance" "We have an increased understanding of our customers/clients/suppliers and competitors with the use of financial data governance"