The Future of the Profession
Assessing Priorities in a Changing Environment

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Strengths

• Financial expertise
• Capability to provide a breadth of services
• Analytical skills for decision making

Weaknesses

• Inadequate communication and critical-thinking skills
• Insufficient anti-fraud education
• Over-reliance on a checklist approach

Opportunities

• Facilitate commerce in the global marketplace
• Broaden client base through new technology
• Enhance the integrity of financial information
• Identify business economic risks

Threats

• Over-regulation
• Litigation risk
• Lack of mobility across state and international borders
• Disconnect between accounting education and practice.

The importance of this last issue prompted The CPA Journal editors to sponsor a forum in November 2007 titled “Preparing Future Accounting Professionals,” which brought educators, practitioners, and regulators together in one room to discuss the challenges facing the profession from their respective vantage points. The highlights of the first panel, “How the 150-Hour Requirement Is Affecting the Profession,” are presented on page 16, and the second, “How Academics and Practitioners Can Work Together,” will appear in next month’s issue. I think you’ll agree that even though the panelists often disagreed on how best to solve the problems facing the profession, they all acknowledged that enhanced communication and cooperation between educators and practitioners are essential. Accounting professionals need a solid grounding in both theory and practice in order to succeed in an increasingly complex business environment.

The World of Academe

In classrooms across the country, accounting education takes place in a vacuum, often isolated from the profession its students will soon be entering. Professors pat one another on the back for their most recent research grants, and value academic degrees above practical experience. Furthermore, many educators conveniently ignore the reality that accounting is an applied discipline in a constantly changing environment, one that is being transformed by technology, global competition, and increased public expectations. Today, that includes not only knowing international accounting standards and how they are implemented in different countries, but also recognizing the diversity of cultures and how that affects social behavior. Accountants can no longer afford to be mere number-crunchers; they need to understand what motivates individuals, how to identify risks, and how to determine a company’s biases. For example, if a misstatement were to occur, is the company more likely to overstate net income or to understate it? But how can students learn about the realities of international business when their professors are far removed from the world of business?

The Compensation Conundrum

At a recent joint meeting of the Accounting Program Leadership Group and the Federation of Schools of Accountancy (APLG/FSA), the attendees, including department chairs and deans of schools of accountancy, discussed recruiting, retaining, and compensating accounting educators. With the impending shortage of accounting PhDs and increasing demand, I recall what my old Economics 101 course taught me: Salaries for this group of job candidates will likely skyrocket. In fact, one dean shared a story about her college’s recent attempt to hire an additional faculty member—an accounting PhD—who summarily turned them down in favor of a $300,000 offer from another college. Paying that salary level to incoming accounting PhDs would break the budgets of most colleges and universities. Furthermore, such a move would probably trigger animosity and resentment among tenured faculty members who have provided loyal service to the institution for many years and earn far less.

Some colleges have addressed the PhD shortfall by recruiting foreign nationals from countries such as China. [A significant increase in the number of professors who identify themselves as Asian in the membership profiles of the American Accounting Association (AAA) bears this out.] This solution, however, creates other issues, not the least of which is the communication challenge associated with learning a technical subject from a non–native speaker.

The looming shortage of accounting professors could also be seen as an opportunity, however, to broaden the search for accounting educators by augmenting the professorial ranks with individuals from nontraditional, practice-oriented backgrounds. Accounting educators need to decide their priorities: Do we want professors who will focus their efforts on research, or teachers who can best serve our students in the classroom and help future accountants capitalize on the strengths and opportunities that our profession has to offer?

As always, I welcome your comments.

Mary-Jo Kranacher, MBA, CPA, CFE
Editor-in-Chief
mkranacher@nysscpa.org

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