CAQ award gives researchers access to audit professionals

The Center for Audit Quality (CAQ) and the Auditing Section of the American Accounting Association (AAA) announced four winners of their inaugural awards program designed to facilitate accounting and auditing academics’ ability to gain access to audit firm personnel who could participate in their research projects.

The CAQ, which is affiliated with the AICPA, and the AAA Auditing Section established the program to help generate research on issues that are relevant to audit practice, while providing doctoral students and tenure-track professors with access to audit firm staff to complete data collection.

A committee of senior academics and audit practitioners evaluated academic proposals based on factors including the ability to address important research questions that are relevant to practice, contribution to academic literature, and methodological soundness.

From the nearly 50 proposals, the review committee selected the following four winners:

• Ashley Austin, University of Georgia—Improving Auditors’ Consideration and Disconfirming Evidence When Evaluating Complex Estimate Assumptions (with Jackie Hammersley)
• Melissa Carlisle, Georgia Tech—Management Inquiry: Does Mode of Communication Matter?
• Marcus Doxey, University of Kentucky—Improving Audits of Management Estimates: The Role of Effective Audit Committees and Public Materiality Disclosure (with Linda McDaniel and Bob Ramsay)
• Aaron Zimbelman, University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign—Is That Your Final Answer? Understanding and Improving Auditor Judgment Through Dialectical Bootstrapping (with Mark Peecher)