Wednesday, December 9, 2020

Professional Judgment: Examining how accounting professionals make decisions

 


The discipline of accounting and auditing has increasingly recognized judgment and decision making as highly important attributes in the profession because individuals such as managers, auditors, financial analysts, accountants and standard setters make pivotal judgments and decisions.

As an Associate Professor of Accounting at the Edwards School of Business, University of Saskatchewan, Regan Schmidt, Ph.D, CPA, CA, undertakes research on accounting professionals’ judgment and decision making using experimental methods. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for Issues in Accounting Education and is on Editorial Boards for Behavioral Research in AccountingAccounting Education, and Accounting Perspectives

He collaborates with public accounting firms and accounting professionals to improve accounting practices. These collaborations have contributed to advances in the fields of auditing, financial reporting and taxation. His research tries to “understand, explain, predict, and ultimately improve how accounting professionals make judgments and decisions.” Accounting professionals include auditors, financial statement preparers, financial statement users, tax professionals, and others (for example, accountants serving on professional committees). The research primarily uses experimental methods to examine and extend psychology theories in the accounting institutional context.

For more information, refer to the 2019 article by Joelena Leader entitled 
Professional Judgment: Examining how auditors, accountants and professional committees make decisions. Also, read the article Judgment and Decision-Making Research in Auditing and Accounting: Future Research Implications of Person, Task, and Environment Perspective by Rajni Mala and Parmod Chand. The article was published in the March 2015 edition of the Canadian Academic Accounting Association (CAAA) publication Accounting Perspectives which is available at the Wiley Online Library.