Associate business dean earns American Accounting Association award

LAWRENCE – Susan Scholz, associate dean and Porter Faculty Fellow at the University of Kansas School of Business, will receive the 2018 Deloitte Foundation Wildman Medal Award from the American Accounting Association (AAA). Scholz is being honored for her paper “Financial Restatement Trends in the United States: 2003-2012,” published by the Center for Audit Quality in 2014.

In the paper, she investigated how restatements, or corrections of inaccurate financial statements, changed in the years after the Sarbanes-Oxley Act went into effect. Scholz considered the number of restatements, how much they affected the market and what types of mistakes were corrected.

“The paper was very interesting to work on, and it benefited greatly from many discussions with auditors and academics facilitated by the Center for Audit Quality, which suggested the paper,” Scholz said. “I think it is important that research is useful outside of academe. So, I was particularly pleased to win this award because it is given to a paper most likely to contribute to the practice of public accountancy.”

The accounting professor's research focuses on public policy issues involving restatements and auditor choice. Her studies appear in several accounting and law journals, and they have been published by the U.S. Treasury Department as well as the Center for Audit Quality. She serves as deputy senior editor for Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory, is on the editorial board of The Accounting Review and was previously an associate editor for Accounting Horizons. She currently is secretary of the AAA Auditing Section and chair of the Auditing Section Doctoral Consortium.

The Deloitte Foundation Wildman Medal Award was founded in 1978 to commemorate John Wildman — a longtime partner at Deloitte and the first president of the American Association of University Instructors in Accounting, which later became AAA — and to encourage research relevant to the professional practice of accounting. Recipients are chosen by an award committee, and the award is sponsored by the Deloitte Foundation.

Scholz will be honored with a medal and monetary prize Aug. 7 at the 2018 AAA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.