Artificial Intelligence (AI) Usage Policy

Authors may use generative AI or AI-assisted technologies to support activities such as language improvement, literature organization, idea development, coding support, data exploration, statistical assistance, visualization, or manuscript preparation. AI tools must not replace the authors' critical thinking, scholarly judgment, accounting analysis, tax interpretation, financial reasoning, methodological evaluation, or original scientific contribution.

Authors are responsible for:

• verifying factual accuracy and checking references generated by AI;
• reviewing and substantially editing AI-assisted content;
• checking for bias, hallucination, fabricated citations, incorrect accounting treatments, inaccurate tax interpretations, or misleading financial information;
• protecting confidential, personal, copyrighted, proprietary, corporate, financial, tax, client, and unpublished data;
• independently validating AI-assisted calculations, financial ratios, accounting classifications, tax computations, models, code, or statistical results; and
• ensuring that the final manuscript represents the authors' own scholarly work.

Meaningful use of generative AI in manuscript preparation must be disclosed in a separate AI Declaration. The declaration should identify the tool used, its purpose, and the extent of human review and oversight.

Basic spelling, grammar, or punctuation checks do not normally require disclosure. If AI forms part of the research method, financial analysis, tax modelling, accounting classification, econometric analysis, coding, document analysis, or data-processing workflow, its use must be described in sufficient detail in the Methods section.

AI tools, chatbots, and language models must not be listed as authors or co-authors. Authorship requires human responsibility for the integrity of the work, approval of the final manuscript, accountability for its scientific content, and the ability to respond to questions regarding accounting data, tax information, analytical methods, calculations, interpretations, and conclusions.

Generative AI must not be used to create, manipulate, obscure, remove, or introduce features in research figures, financial charts, accounting records, scanned documents, tax documents, graphs, screenshots, tables, or other visual material submitted as scientific evidence.

An exception may apply when AI-assisted image recognition, document classification, optical analysis, visualization, pattern recognition, or automated financial-document processing is an explicit part of the research design or methodology. In such cases, authors must describe the tool, model/version, procedure, input data, validation process, and its role in generating or interpreting research data in the Methods section.

Submitted manuscripts are confidential documents. Reviewers must not upload manuscripts, manuscript excerpts, financial data, tax information, corporate records, supporting files, accounting documents, or review reports into generative AI systems.

Peer review is a human scholarly responsibility. AI tools must not be used to generate scientific assessments, independently evaluate accounting validity, interpret tax findings, assess manuscript quality, or determine review recommendations. Reviewers remain personally responsible for the content and integrity of their reports.

Editors must not upload submitted manuscripts, confidential correspondence, reviewer reports, unpublished financial data, corporate or tax information, accounting records, or editorial decision letters into public generative AI systems.

AI must not replace human editorial judgment or be used to determine acceptance, revision, or rejection. Editors remain fully responsible for editorial evaluation, communication, scientific oversight, and final publication decisions.