Welcome to this week's roundup of baffled buckaroos. Each week we'll try to save some […]
Tag: Accounting Professors
Indiana University Accounting Professor Dies After Fall From Parking Garage
Sad news on the Indiana University campus as accounting professor Susan Keenan died from injuries suffered […]
Minnesota Accounting Professor’s Real World Experience Proves To Be a Double-Edged Sword
Joseph Traxler was the CFO of Centennial Mortgage and Funding Inc. in Bloomington. He helped […]
Northern Illinois Accounting Professor Is the Subject of the Nerdiest, Most Obscure Hitler Parody Video To Date
The Hitler outburst video meme has long run its course but every once in a […]
Will One Bad Class Spell Doom for a Big 4 Recruit?
Today's blog post is brought to you by a worrisome soon-to-be-grad. Hi GC, I already […]
Do You Know an Exceptional Accounting Educator?
You've probably never heard of it (degenerates) but the AICPA Distinguished Achievement in Accounting Education […]
Why Don’t More Accounting Professors Blog?
I’ll admit, I’ve trolled Tom Selling’s Accounting Onion. From what I hear, Tom doesn’t appreciate my potty mouth but that doesn’t mean I appreciate his salty opinion any less. He hates the idea of IFRS in the U.S., which immediately endears anyone to me, and I enjoy his candid (if slightly more boring than what you all are used to here on Going Concern) tone.
So when I was in full-on troll mode and saw Tom’s recent Why Do Accounting Academics Blog Less Than Other Academics? post, I had to tweet it. Short version of the eems like every bunch of academics except those in accounting seem to blog their bookish little butts off?
Well one blogging academic didn’t like that tweet (don’t shoot the messenger, bro, I am in enough trouble for my actual opinions, I don’t need heat on account of someone else’s *troll win*) and ended up writing an entire post in response *extra troll win*. Associate Professor and Chair of Accounting & Taxation at Seton Hall University’s Stillman School of Business, Mark Holtzman, wrote the following on his Accounting Ethicist blog:
Last night I read the Accounting Onion’s latest post, asking “why do accounting academics blog less than other academics?” The writer, Tom Selling, offers a novel, if implausible theory:
We (accounting professors) rely on the Big-4 oligopoly to hire our students:
There are certainly tradeoffs to blogging, but they all seem to be roughly the same across academic disciplines, except for the presence of the Big Four. For some reason, that appears to be a net negative in relation to blogging opportunities.
Could it be that blogging by accounting professors is detrimental to the career prospects of one’s accounting students? I’m just asking.
I immediately tweeted that this post was not nice or true. (I then added, in a second tweet, that “Accounting professors don’t blog much because we are too busy with teaching, research and service.” That was admittedly a poorly-thought-out answer – Accounting professors are just as busy as English profs or any other area.)
First of all, Accounting Onion’s theory would suggest that somehow the Big-4 fuel an atmosphere of fear. Here’s a narrative: Accounting academics are afraid to say what they really think for fear of upsetting Big-4 recruiters, and that Big-4 recruiters would viciously retaliate against these academics by refusing to hire their students. That’s ridiculous. I think I can speak for my colleagues when I say that we’re not willing to lie (or withhold the truth) in order to get prestigious employers to hire our students.
Furthermore, I’ve worked for the Big-4 (or I should say the Big-8 and Big-6 – scratch that! I haven’t worked for the Big-4, have I?). In my capacity as a Department Chair, I know many Big-4 recruiters and employees. And we accounting professors do have a lot of far-fetched opinions. But I don’t know any recruiters or partners who would retaliate against students because of their professors’ far-fetched opinions. The Big-4 firms are very systematic about who they recruit and wise enough to hire our students in spite of us and our wacky opinions.
That said, how do we answer Accounting Onion’s question? Where are all the accounting professor-bloggers?
Here goes: I’m sorry to say that accounting doesn’t make for very interesting blogging. See any interesting tax footnotes lately? How ’bout that new FASB proposal? IFRS is already a joke – how many bloggers do we need to point that out? Here comes “Little GAAP.” Is there anything interesting to say about “Little GAAP?” And while I’m at it, have you ever seen the list of topics at a AAA meeting? There could be more accounting professor blogs, yes, but who would want to read all that cr@p?
He goes on to point out that there are notable exceptions to the rule – Going Concern being one of them – but for the most part, the gist I got was that accounting is too fucking boring to warrant dedicating one’s time and effort to writing about it. Thanks for crushing my lofty career goals and any pride I had (if I ever did) in what I actually do for a living.
Pride isn’t the only thing that makes me take issue with that. I have somehow made writing about accounting my life for the last three years so I get that it’s boring. Trust me, I am the last person on the planet who would have ever thought accounting could be interesting but then I started following the adoption of IFRS in the U.S., SEC employees’ porn problems, massive frauds and interesting police blotters starring CPAs around the country. Know what? It’s not that fucking boring. And I don’t just say that to make myself feel better about my questionable career choices.
Who would want to read about that crap? A lot of people, actually. I am amazed by the amount of traffic I get on accounting-related posts on Jr Deputy Accountant that are months or even years old. Are accountants on top of the news cycle? Well no, there is no news cycle. Thank God I have the CPA exam to write about or else I might be out of a job for as little news we get in this industry. But accountants are just as interested in opinion and information as anyone, if not more.
So? What do you guys think? Would you actually read blogs by your accounting professors?
Former IRS Investigator-cum-Accounting Professor Claims He Took Money from 18 Year-old Prostitute ‘To Protect Her,’ Denies Pimp Status
Accounting professors can be a strange lot. This is known. Whether they’re getting ejected from basketball games, taking off their shirts for money or taking their pants for free, there is no shortage of curious behavior.
Then there’s the story of Kemp Shiffer, who was a part-time professor at the University of Nevada-Reno and IRS investigator. Prof Shiffer was arrested on August 3rd when he collected $400 from a 18 year-old prostitute:
The woman told police that before she began prostituting for Kemp Shiffer, he made her “try out” for the job by performing multiple sex acts on him, according to a probable cause affidavit filed in Reno Justice Court to support his Aug. 3 arrest.
After Shiffer took the money from the 18-year-old Eureka, Calif., woman at the Peppermill Resort Casino Spa just before 10 p.m. Aug. 3, detectives of the regional Street Enforcement Team arrested him.
“He spontaneously stated ‘I am not a pimp. I didn’t collect her money as her pimp. I collected it to protect her,’” according to the affidavit filed last week against the 58-year-old.
Apparently this isn’t Shiffer’s first attempt at “protection” as the Reno Gazette-Journal also reports that he quit the IRS after an investigation into his attempt to use “his authority and his badge to secure women to work as prostitutes for him.”
The reader who pointed us to the story simply had this to say, “And he was my favorite accounting professor when I was in school… who knew?”
Hopefully none of your female classmates.
Records: Retired IRS investigator charged with pandering said ‘I am not a pimp’ [RGJ]
(UPDATE, VIDEO) GW Accounting Professor Gives Qualified Opinion of Referee’s Services, Gets Ejected
Up until now, we’ve heard more about accounting professors losing their clothes (shirt, pants) than anything their tempers. But today, we learned about a prof who was expressing an expert opinion (perhaps a little too strongly) on the value of a service:
An accounting professor and high-profile supporter of the GW Athletics program was escorted from the Smith Center Saturday for verbally confronting a referee over a foul call. From his sideline seat on the court, Robert Kasmir yelled at the referee over a foul call on sophomore forward David Pellom, prompting his removal from the court by a member of the athletics department. “Basically, I told the ref he was the worst ref I’d ever seen and he wasn’t worth the $1,600 dollars they were paying him and that was it,” Kasmir said. “And then he ejected me from the game.”
We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the fact that Mr Kasmir isn’t that bad of a guy:
Kasmir’s ejection came after he and his family were honored during the second half for their contributions to GW Athletics. Kasmir, who received his MBA from GW in 1974, has made at least one donation to the University ranging from $10,000 to $24,999, according to financial documents. Kasmir said the ejection would not keep him from making further donations to the University in the future.
But as for that referee, Kasmir has a very unqualified view, “I think the official should never be allowed to officiate another game in the Atlantic 10, in college basketball, in the United States.”
UPDATE: From the Post for those of you that like visuals:
Professor, donor tossed from basketball game [GW Hatchet via Deadspin]
Does This Chiseled Torso Belong to an Accounting Professor?
Yesterday, as I was moseying through the typical day of an accounting firm scourge, a message dropped into my inbox that caught me off guard. A reader alerted me to this Daily News article that reported the winners of the Wilhelmina Hot Body Model Search. Nothing really too Earth-shattering except that our tipster noted that one of the winners has an uncanny resemblance to this accounting professor “who taught me financial reporting a few years ago.”
I took a gander and have to admit, the similarities are there but I had my doubts. Not that it would be unheard of for an accounting professor to win a Hot Body Model Search but…it’s a little unheard of for an accounting professor to win a Hot Body Model Search. Especially one with a PhD from Cornell and whose research interests in “capital markets, behavioral finance and the behaviors of arbitrageurs, earnings management and intangibles.” That simply can’t be possible, can it? I couldn’t reach the model and our conversation with the professor in question basically went like this:
In other words, a non-denial denial. I guess we’ll have to figure it out for ourselves then. All right team – could it really be the same guy, or is this just his long-lost twin?
Fraud Experts: Calls for Criminal Charges Against Ernst & Young Are ‘Absurd’
Since Andrew Cuomo decided to make our lives insanely busy this week, we’ve been talking to lots of different people about what will happen next in the Ernst & Young saga. We stumbled across a couple of experts, Dr. Mark Zimbelman an Accounting Professor who specializes in fraud, forensic accounting and auditors’ detection of fraud at BYU’s Marriott School of Business, along with his son, Aaron Zimbelman, a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign whose research interests include auditing, financial statement fraud and corporate governance.
The father and son team have a blog, Fraudbytes, that discusses, well<