Accounting Professors Win National Awards for Research

PROVO, Utah – Oct 13, 2014 – The American Accounting Association recently honored Marriott School of Management accounting professors Doug Prawitt, David Wood and Bryan Stewart with a pair of prestigious awards for exceptional research in behavioral and organizational accounting.

“It’s important for our program to be recognized as a thought leader, and the best way we can do that is through rigorous, consequential research,” says Jeff Wilks, director of Brigham Young University’s School of Accountancy. “The fact that our peers recognize our professors’ research as most likely to have an impact on the field of behavioral and organizational accounting shows that we have excellent professors that can help our students to be successful academically and later professionally.”

Prawitt and Wood were honored with the Behavioral Research in Accounting 2014 Best Paper award, given to the top paper in the BRIA academic journal, an AAA-sponsored publication. Their article “Reconciling archival and experimental research: Does internal audit contribution affect the external audit fee” is unique in its use of archival data from actual companies to validate other studies that use experimental methodologies. It also validates the importance of internal auditing by explaining how effective internal auditors can reduce the fees their company incurs through external auditing.

“One group that doesn’t get a lot of recognition is internal audit,” Wood says. “Our research shows that this group really does matter and has a real impact on improving business both in reducing fees, as shown in this research, and also in reducing fraud, earnings management and other problems, as shown in other research.”

The AAA also gave its Accounting, Behavior and Organizations section’s 2014 Outstanding Emerging Scholar Manuscript award to Stewart for his article “Unintended Consequences of Regulated Fee Structure.” This award is given to professors in their first two years as faculty members for outstanding research in the field of behavioral and organizational accounting.

“BYU’s accounting program is a great program and the professors here are incredible,” says Stewart, assistant accounting professor who joined BYU’s ranks just over a year ago. “I’m really happy to be part of an environment at the Marriott School that fosters research and new ideas.”  

The awards will be officially presented at the Accounting, Behavior and Organization’s conference later this month in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The Marriott School is located at Brigham Young University, the largest privately owned, church-sponsored university in the United States. The school has nationally recognized programs in accounting, business management, entrepreneurship, finance, information systems and public management. The school’s mission is to prepare men and women of faith, character and professional ability for positions of leadership throughout the world. Approximately 3,000 students are enrolled in the Marriott School’s graduate and undergraduate programs.