Rapid advances in technology are quickly disrupting the auditing, accounting and financial reporting industry at a pace not seen in decades. As soon as one leap forward is adopted, such as cloud technology, another waits in the wings, such as blockchain.
The Financial Executives Research and Education Foundation is working on a report looking to help senior-level financial executives better understand how to consider and prioritize changes in financial technology.
As part of that effort we speak with Dr. Ryan Teeter, clinical assistant professor of accounting information systems at the University of Pittsburgh regarding his work on the area of technology changes in the financial reporting industry.
A transcript of the discusion appears below the podcast player.Financial Education & Research Foundation (FERF): Can you describe your background and the areas of focus in your research right now?
Ryan Teeter, Ph.D.: I have a background in technology and accounting. Technology has always been a bit of a hobby for me. And that love was true during undergraduate as well as my graduate work. So much so that I worked in various areas within technology. I took a summer internship with Google out in California dealing with development and training when Google apps had just come out and was being used by businesses.
And then in my Ph.D. program, I got involved in continuous auditing and audit automation which is my primary focus of research. And I worked on a couple of projects with CNN News and Proctor & Gamble working on their IT audit and automating some of those portions of their audits. We were talking about this idea of continuous monitoring to help managers control information and provide feedback on the accounting processes themselves.
Since I got my Ph.D. in accounting information systems at Rutgers, I've since been at the University of Pittsburgh where I have been actively involved in accounting information systems and developing a data analytics for accounting course in our master's program. I recently published a test book with McGraw-Hill with my co-authors Vernon Richardson and Katie Terrell on the analytics for accounting. This builds on the basic idea of fundamentals for data analysis and then gets into specific knowledge. How do we apply that to financial reports and auditing and managerial attacks?
Like a lot of things, we see a lot start with emerging technologies and data analysis and...