Accounting professor earns journal best paper award

LAWRENCE — The American Accounting Association has honored University of Kansas Professor Scott Bronson and his co-authors as recipients of the 2016 Accounting Horizons Best Paper Award.

Their study — “Accelerated Filing Deadlines, Internal Controls, and Financial Statement Quality: The Case of Originating Misstatements” — was published in Accounting Horizons’ September 2015 issue. Bronson was honored Aug. 10 in New York at the American Accounting Association’s 2016 annual meeting.

“Our study examines the joint effect of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s accelerated filings deadlines and the Sarbanes-Oxley internal control audit requirements on financial reporting quality,” Bronson said.

“While we find some evidence of a decline in financial reporting quality in the initial years of the acceleration,” he said, “our results suggest that this decline is temporary. Our study supports the SEC’s claim that investors can receive more timely information without sacrificing financial reporting quality.”

In 2003, the SEC enacted rules that shortened the window that larger public companies have to complete and file annual quarterly financial reports. The SEC intended for these accelerated filings deadlines to improve the timeliness of financial statement information, but corporations and their auditors argued that complying with shorter deadlines would reduce financial reporting quality, Bronson said.

“Soon after the filing acceleration, the Sarbanes-Oxley internal control audit requirements became effective with intent to increase financial reporting quality,” he said.

Bronson is an associate professor of accounting in the School of Business. He is an auditing researcher whose work focuses on how financial regulations affect the reporting decisions of companies and their auditors.

His research has been published in Journal of Accounting and Economics, Contemporary Accounting Research, Accounting Horizons, Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory, and Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, and he currently serves on the editorial board of Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory.

The Accounting Horizons Best Paper Award is presented to the best paper published each calendar year. Award recipients are selected by online voting open to all Accounting Horizons-subscribing members of the American Accounting Association.

The American Accounting Association is the largest community of accountants in academia.