Welcome to Research at Edwards
Keith Willoughby, Associate Dean Academic
Welcome to the Edwards School of Business Research web site. I am excited about the quality and quantity of research that is being conducted here at the Edwards School of Business. Research plays a major role in the reputation of any business school and here at the University of Saskatchewan we are proud of our outstanding faculty and their accomplishments. Explore our fully searchable publications database and find out what interesting things we are doing.
FEATURED RESEARCHER
Regan Schmidt
Department of Accounting
Working in public practice has given
Professor and Chartered Accountant Regan Schmidt a clear idea of the issues
auditors deal with. “I always inform my students that, in my opinion, audit
experience is among the best business experience you can get,” he says. “In
public practice, you see the issues that auditors encounter, and academic
research is best suited to provide the answers.” Dr.
Schmidt’s research focuses on one such issue in the area of control environment
evaluation. “This study is the first, to my knowledge, that actually tries to
grasp with how an auditor goes out and gathers information on client management’s
ethicality and competence as it relates to financial reporting practices.” “What the study
results show is that auditors are striving to conduct their audit procedures in
a diagnostic fashion,” he says. Moreover,
Schmidt also looked at whether the current decision aid used in practice – a
checklist tool – was effective in assisting auditors to evaluate the control
environment. “The literature has found that if you are given a checklist, you tend
to tick boxes rather than think. Stated
differently, a checklist may interfere with how an individual uses their
knowledge on a particular task,” he states. “In contrast, I developed a
decision aid which is structured differently in order to assist the auditor in
applying their knowledge in the task. I
found the new decision aid was the most effective tool in helping the auditor
to increase the extent of diagnostic testing which means that it aided the
auditor to search for the most informative information on which to base their
decisions.” The completion
of Schmidt’s research is timely. The Committee
of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) announced in
November 2010 that it will be revising the current internal control framework
and checklist-style decision aid – the most widely used framework and tools among
publicly traded firms in North America.
EVENTS AT A GLANCE
Apr 16, 2012 : M.Sc. in Finance Thesis Defence - Timothy Kent
Apr 16, 2012 : External Examiner Presentation - Dr. Murray Cote
Oct 07, 2011 : Presentation : Disappearing Dividends: A Rational Explanation and Implications
Aug 23, 2011 : M.Sc. in Finance Thesis Defence - Ivana Zaharieva
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