Eileen Taylor

Over the past eight years, the public accounting profession has gone through great change. New regulation (SOX and Dodd-Frank), corporate scandals, increased demands from the public, and the advent of offshoring of professional tasks have changed the landscape of public accounting and necessitated a hard look at the challenges public accounting firms face in retaining competent, dedicated professionals. Using survey responses from current public accounting firm seniors; this study seeks to answer research questions about turnover intention (the expectation that the employee will leave either the firm or the profession in the near future). We explore whether mentoring and mentoring challenges can effectively reduce turnover intention. We also examine the effect of the firm?s ethical climate on turnover intention. Although prior research has addressed some of these questions, no recent research exists and no research has included the effect of including mentoring challenges. Given the sea change that has occurred since 2003, it is relevant and helpful to ask these questions. Results contribute by informing practice of concrete steps they can take to address human resource needs in the global economy.

The spate of high-profile accounting scandals in the early 2000's coupled with increasingly complex financial instruments and multifaceted global operations have significantly heightened corporate risk and investors need for understanding that risk. In response, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adopted Regulation S-K, effective 2005, which requires corporations to provide, within their 10-K, a disclosure of the risks that may adversely affect the issuer's business, operations, industry, or financial position, or its future financial performance (Securities and Exchange Commission, 2004; 2005). Since investors must be able to read and understand the disclosures in order for them to be useful, the regulation specifically requires that the risk factors be written using plain English principles. However, a review of item 1a disclosures suggests that they are written in legalese, calling into question their usefulness to investors, especially nonprofessional investors. This study investigates how these investors respond to risk factors written in plain English, rather than in legalese. We specifically explore the effect of risk factor readability on investors' perceptions of corporate risk, management's reporting credibility (trustworthiness and competence), and investment likelihood (stock price and buy/sell/hold). We anticipate that the SEC and other investor protection agencies (e.g. FINRA, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) will be interested in our study results. Should we find that high readability allows investors to develop a better understanding of corporate risk, these organizations can focus on enforcement of the existing plain English provision. Should we find that high readability leads to positive investor perceptions of management's reporting credibility, corporate registrants may choose to reduce spending for legal fees to construct complex risk disclosures.

To conduct research at the 2008 summer in-charge training class that will extend our knowledge of the determinants of, and inhibitions to, whistleblowing in public accounting. In particular, we plan to explore the issue of persistence in reporting, individual and firm interactions (mentoring, level of actors, and organizational commitment), and the influence of incentives in increasing appropriate reporting. We discuss each briefly below.

Although it has been almost ten years since an international non-profit consortium began the XBRL reporting project, widespread use of XBRL is still uncommon in the United States (Hannon, 2004). Among other benefits, XBRL adoption enables companies to provide real-time financial reporting accompanied by continuous assurance, seamlessly exchange information with external parties, and allow widespread distribution of information in a format independent of a specific software application (Coffin, 2001). Given the benefits of XBRL to multiple stakeholders, and the lag in US adoption, this investigation seeks to identify the factors that influence XBRL adoption, both in the US and globally. The study encompasses two phases in order to explore the phenomenon using a multi-method approach. The first phase uses archival data (see methods section below) to complete a descriptive study of current XBRL adopters and XBRL consortium members. The second phase involves collection of survey data from US managers in order to identify the level of knowledge, cost/benefit perceptions, and concerns about XBRL adoption in general and within their firms. Together, these phases will explain the current state of adoption globally, identify significant antecedents to adoption, and point out barriers to adoption in the US.