Alumni Newsletter Fall 2021

The Evolving Responsibilities of the Audit Committee * Team: Lauren Cunningham from the University of Tennessee; Sarah Stein, Kimberly Walker, and Karneisha Wolfe all from Virginia Tech Grant: CAQ Research Advisory Board Grant The enactment of SOX requires audit committees to be directly responsible for appointing, compensating, and overseeing the company’s independent auditor and monitoring the quality of the financial reporting process. In many cases, the audit committee also takes on additional roles such as ensuring the company is meeting strategic and operational goals, supervising the risk oversight process, and overseeing the internal audit function. More recently, many boards have tasked audit committees with additional oversight and advising responsibilities. While information regarding audit committees’ responsibilities is informative to companies’ stakeholders, audit committees’ public disclosures relating to their responsibilities vary. The goal in this study is to interview audit committee members that serve publicly traded companies in the U.S. to learnmore about their experiences—including their evolving responsibilities— in order to aggregate best practices and challenges to share with others. Along with insight into these evolving responsibilities, the authors expect that their study will provide insight into how audit committees determine what to publicly disclose about

their responsibilities along with how they evaluate their performance in this role. *The name of the project has been updated from what is listed on the CAQ RAB site. https://www.thecaq.org/research-advisory-board-grant-recipients/

MEET THE AUTHORS

Dr. Sudip Bhattacharjee

Dr. Sean Hillison

Carissa Malone

Dr. Sarah Stein

Dr. KimberlyWalker

KarneishaWolfe

Dr. Sudip Bhattacharjee is a Professor in the ACIS department. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research interests include examining decision making in accounting and auditing contexts using behavioral decision theory. He seeks to understand judgment and decision making within the accounting and auditing contexts in an effort to understand and enhance real- world decision making. Dr. Sean Hillison joined the ACIS department in the fall of 2017 after completing a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. Dr. Hillison’s primary research interests include judgment and decision-making in accounting and auditing. Carissa Malone joined the PhD program in the Accounting and Information Systems department at Virginia Tech in the Fall of 2017. Her research focuses on the judgment and decision making of auditors. She is an AICPA Doctoral Fellow and a member of Beta Gamma Sigma Honor Society and The PhD Project. In 2021, Carissa received the Best PhD Student Paper Award from the Auditing Section of the American Accounting Association Dr. Sarah Stein is an associate professor and the Deloitte Foundation Faculty Fellow in the ACIS department. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. Her research interests relate to topics involving the audit market, auditor expertise, accounting associations and networks, and complex estimates. Dr. Stein’s innovative data visualization audit case is the recipient of the 2019 Best Paper Award in Issues in Accounting Education and the 2020 Innovation in Auditing and Assurance Education Award. Dr. Kimberly Walker is a new assistant professor in the ACIS department. She recently graduated with her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interest includes exploring the effects of audit technologies on auditor judgments and decisions. Karneisha Wolfe joined the Ph.D. program in the Accounting and Information Systems department at Virginia Tech in the Fall of 2018. Her research interests include audit judgement and decision-making, profession skepticism and audit regulations. She is an Accounting Doctoral Scholar Program (ADS) scholar. In 2021, she earned a Deloitte Foundation Doctoral Fellowship.

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