Creative Accounting?

When it comes to thinking outside the box, teacher, researcher and auditing expert
Kinney sets the standard.

By Dorothy Brady

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Transcending national boundaries

As a public member of the IAASB, Kinney participates in a free interchange of ideas among a global volunteer group of 18 experts charged with developing consensus about best rules and practices for auditors in jurisdictions worldwide.

“Willing investors around the world want useful and reliable information about corporations and will demand higher costs of capital if they don’t get it,” Kinney says. In other words, while accounting and auditing standards are important, investors care little about whether accounting and auditing rules are set by the government or by the private sector. Kinney cares, however, “because I believe that the choice affects costs and benefits of auditing for society as well as the nature and attractiveness of the auditing profession for my students.

“One needs independence and expertise,” he says. “The government can be independent of management and independent of the auditors, but the auditors are the ones who know best how their work is done, so getting the proper blend is an organizational design question.”

Nurturing the next generation

While his public service as an advisor to standard-setting bodies is a highly visible contribution to the profession, Kinney’s research and teaching have also garnered impressive national accolades. He has received the AICPA Distinguished Achievement in Accounting Education Award; two American Accounting Association (AAA)
Outstanding Educator Awards; three Deloitte and Touche/AAA John R. Wildman Awards and an AICPA/AAA Notable Contribution to Accounting Literature Award for his research, and the list goes on.

Though his awards and trophies could potentially cover every surface of Kinney’s office, only one is on display. It is an award of merit for chairing the dissertation of his student, Sandra Vera Muñoz, who won an AAA doctoral dissertation competition in 1994.

“Though I’m very appreciative of all the honors I’ve received, to be cited for helping a talented Ph.D. student write an innovative dissertation means more to me by far,” he says.

His influence has had long-lasting effects for Vera-Muñoz, now an associate professor and KPMG Faculty Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. “Bill taught me invaluable skills that I will use in my research and teaching throughout my career,” she says. “But the best thing about working with Bill, whether as a doctoral student or as a colleague and co-author, is that his passion and excitement about accounting research is contagious.”

“What starts here…”

Kinney says the university instills such enthusiasm by encouraging professors to think deeply about why the world is as it is, and which dials can be turned to improve the world. “Using all the tools available at the university—economics, psychology, finance, political science, law and statistics—I can better understand the world and convey that understanding to my students,” he says.

Preparing students for what they’ll need to know for their next 30 years has pointed Kinney toward the problems in practice that creative research may solve. “If I didn’t teach, I wouldn’t think about practical problems that feed a good researcher; if I didn’t do research and think about auditing standards, I wouldn’t be a good teacher for future practitioners, either.”

Through this interplay, everybody wins—society gets graduates whose independent thinking brings together the power of the intellectual disciplines on campus, and the students get a professor who knows the issues of the day and whose research is directed toward those issues. Kinney also counts himself among the biggest beneficiaries. “Helping future practitioners and professors find their way in a dynamic world is a wonderfully rewarding assignment.”

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