University of North Carolina Wilmington Cameron School of Business Accountancy and Business Law The ABL Journal Vol. 18, March 2015 Mark your calendars Chairman’s Corner Business Week Tuesday/Wednesday, March 24 & 25, 2015 BAP Induction Thursday, April 23, 2015 MSA Advisory Board Mtg. Friday, April 24, 2015 Golf Event Friday, April 24, 2015 David Mautz Department Chair Inside this issue: MSA Program Update 2 Spotlight on Alumna 3 Special Appeal 3 ABL News 4 BAP News 5 Faculty Update 5 Internship Update 6 I hope this newsletter finds you well and looking forward to some Spring weather. The Department of Accountancy and Business Law and UNCW has seen many transitions this year. In July 2014, Dan Ivancevich returned to the faculty after serving for two years as Chair, and I assumed this role. My appreciation for Dan’s leadership (and Randy’s before him) grows every day as I learn more about the responsibilities of the job! Dr. Bill Kerler took over as MSA Director and is off to a great start. His report in this newsletter makes clear that we continue to enjoy great placement results and attract top talent to the MSA Program. Following Dean Larry Clark’s departure to become the Chancellor at LSU Shreveport, the Cameron School has benefited from the steady leadership of Interim Dean Rob Burrus. The end of Spring Semester should bring news of both a new Chancellor for UNCW and the next Dean of the Cameron School. Exciting times indeed! The Department began 2014-2015 without the services of two faculty members with a long history of contributions to the Cameron School of Business. Dr. Howard Rockness, Professor of Accountancy and former Dean of the Cameron School, retired in July after 21 years of service to UNCW and a total of 41 years in the UNC System. Dr. Joanne Rockness, Cameron Professor of Accountancy since 1993 and founding Director of the Master of Science in Accountancy Program, also retired in July. Howard and Joanne played critical roles in establishing graduate programs, developing international education, encouraging executive involvement and building relationships in the professional community. Faculty, friends and alumni gathered at a dinner on September 11 to thank Howard and Joanne for their friendship and service. Howard Rockness has been heard to say that “we are only as good as our students.” One of our key success stories this year is MSA graduate Natasha Boswell’s promotion to partner at KPMG. The KPMG New Partners book includes Natasha’s acknowledgement of Joanne Rockness as a source of career advice. You can read more about Natasha in this edition of the ABL Journal. We were fortunate to begin the year with a new faculty hire, Dr. Gerald DeBusk, a Virginia Tech Ph.D. who comes to UNCW from the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. Gerald’s primary interest is managerial accounting, especially Lean Six Sigma and Lean Accounting. In January, we were joined by Dr. Vicki Hansen who will team with Dr. Allison Evans to lead our taxation offerings. Vicki earned her Ph.D. at the University of South Carolina and comes to Wilmington from the State University of New York at New Paltz. Gerald and Vicki are also profiled in this edition. The Department was also fortunate to receive authorization to hire two new professors this year. Both searches were successful and we will begin 2015-2016 by welcoming Dr. Tom Downen, will join us from Southern Illinois University, and Zhan Furner, will join us after completing her Ph.D. at Texas Tech University. Look for more information about both in our next newsletter. We look forward to seeing many of you this month at Business Week and at our upcoming Beta Alpha Psi Initiation Banquet and Golf Outing in April. As always, we love to hear alumni news. Please email me with yours! Finally, this edition of the newsletter includes a special request for your support of the Accountancy and Business Law Fund. Please consider making a gift to support our excellent students, faculty and programs. You can mail a check or make a gift online at our web page, http://csb.uncw.edu/acg/ David Page 2 Bill Kerler — MSA Director Bill Kerler MSA Director As you all know, the MSA Directors before me, Joanne Rockness, Dan Ivancevich, Becky Sawyer, and David Mautz have created a successful MSA program and a powerful learning experience for our students. As a result, when I became MSA Director my goal for the first year was “not to screw it up.” After six months on the job I have quickly realized that our outstanding students and faculty make my job easy and make our MSA program one of the best in the state and beyond! It has been a hectic, productive, and rewarding fall semester for our MSA students. Over a three week period in August and September we had a twoday MSA orientation, a half day of Careers in Accounting sessions, a Donor Dinner, four nights of Meet the Firms, and of course, classes! For job-seeking MSA students, the semester then got even busier with mock interviews, on-campus interviews, and office visits. All of the students performed admirably! We have a class of 66 students this year. Entering the program, 22 of our students (33%) had jobs lined up through internships. As of today, through the tremendous support of our many employer friends and alumni, 55 students (83%) have fulltime jobs lined up after graduation! Job-seeking students continue to have office visits scheduled, so we continue to move closer to our goal of full placement. I want to extend a special thank you to all the employers who have supported our MSA program so far this year by hiring our students. This list includes: BDO, Bryant Real Estate, Carr Riggs and Ingram, Cherry Bekaert, Deloitte, Dixon Hughes Goodman, EY, GreerWalker, Johnson Lambert, KPMG, and McGladrey. We all will continue to work hard to have everyone placed by the MSA Recognition Ceremony on June 27th 2015. If you have any opportunities available for our students, please contact me via email at [email protected] or by phone at (910)-962-7632. Many students have already passed at least one section of the CPA exam! For others, our CPA preparations have begun with our first Becker Fast Pass section (auditing) in mid-December. Students then sat for that section in January. We have revised our Becker Fast Pass schedule so students will sit through classes for all four sections and will take two sections before our recognition ceremony in June. They will then take the remaining two sections in July. We are pushing students to complete the CPA exam before they start working in the fall. We thank all of our recruiters and alumni for stressing to our students the importance of completing the CPA exam early. Students have begun their track concentrations with about 25% choosing the Tax Services track and 75% choosing the Assurance and Systems Advisory track. Looking forward to next year, the admission deadline for the MSA class of 2016 is April 1, 2015. We expect to have a class size of 65. We are excited about the students who have already been accepted and are looking forward to having a very strong class for 2016. The MSA program continues to attract students from around the state of North Carolina and beyond. We greatly appreciate the efforts of our alumni, current students, recruiters, faculty, staff, and friends of the MSA program who continue to recommend our program and thus have helped us recruit outstanding MSA students year after year! Without your support, it would be impossible to maintain the quality program that we have at UNCW. For all MSA alumni, if you have not done so yet, please join our LinkedIn group (“UNCW MSA”). We encourage you to post discussions about current events in accounting, exciting projects you are working on (e.g. community service), or news about promotions! For all recruiters, if you have positions (any experience level) you would like to post on our group’s page please email the announcement to myself ([email protected]) or Dr. David Mautz ([email protected]). Finally, on a personal note, my wife and I welcomed our third child, William, in September. He has been loved enthusiastically and monitored closely by his two big sisters and dog (see included picture)! Page 3 SPOTLIGHT ON AN MSA ALUMNA Class of 1999 Natasha Boswell, MSA’99 graduate, was promoted to partner with KPMG. She specializes in audits of financial institutions in the New York metro area. Natasha’s representative clients include Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo Corp., and Wachovia Corp. Natasha began her accounting career with McGladrey and Pullen, LLP in Charlotte. She joined KPMG as a senior accountant in Charlotte in 2001, where she would work on banking audit engagements for the next 8 years. In the height of the financial crisis, Natasha was nominated by KPMG to join the U.S. Treasury Department as a Professional Accounting Fellow working directly for the Chief Accountant of the national bank regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Natasha and her family relocated to Washington, DC where she worked on coordinating policy development amongst the accounting standard boards including the FASB, the SEC, the IASB and other regulatory agencies, including the FDIC, the FRB and the NCUA. In addition, Natasha coordinated official policy summaries for the G20 Economic Summits, as well as other official forums where the Comptroller would address accounting policy. Natasha also participated in the development of international supervisory guidance through the OCC’s representation on the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and related working groups in Switzerland. As part of her fellowship, Natasha was responsible for completing a study for the SEC regarding the impact of a potential incorporation of IFRS on the financial services industry regulatory activities. Upon her return to KPMG, Natasha joined the firm’s national office in New York City where she was responsible for advising KPMG financial services clients and engagement teams on accounting, auditing and regulatory issues. Natasha is now back “in the field” auditing financial institutions in New York Metro area. Natasha and her husband Chris (also an MSA ’99 alum ) currently reside in Westchester County, NY with their three daughters Daria (14), Anna (13) and Katrina (11). The entire Boswell family are huge fans of winter sports and enjoy skiing somewhere different every year, but their summers are spent in the most wonderful beach town in the country - Wilmington, NC. A Special Appeal to Accountancy and Business Law Alumni The MSA Program is one of the premier accounting programs in our region and is often described as the “crown jewel” of the Cameron School of Business. We attract great students, place them with top firms, and have a dedicated, top-notch faculty. However, the reality is that many of the events and activities that enhance our graduates’ preparation must be funded by contributions rather than state appropriations. Meet the Firms, Accounting Career Day, alumni receptions in Raleigh and Charlotte, and scholarship support all depend on financial support from alumni and firms. This is especially true as UNCW and the Cameron School face continuing budget cuts. On behalf of the students and faculty in the Department, I want to Grey Liston thank everyone who provides financial support to make these and other initiatives possible. Class of 2008 An important next step for UNCW is to broaden our base and encourage moreMSA alumni to provide recurring financial support. A recent report from our Advancement Office identifies nearly 900 MSA graduates! As a part of this distinguished group, you have the power to help increase scholarships, undertake curriculum initiatives and fund professional development for students and faculty. The ABL faculty believes this issue is so important that all of us have pledged to make a gift to the fund. Please think about how UNCW has contributed to your professional success and consider reaching back to help the next generation by making a recurring gift to the Accountancy and Business Law Fund. You can return the form at the bottom of this newsletter with a check, or go online to make a donation using your credit card. Simply follow the link at the Department’s web page: http://csb.uncw.edu/acg/ Page 4 ABL News Donations! If the UNCW Phonathon contacts you to make a contribution to the university, please request that your payment go to support the Accountancy and Business Law Fund. Thank You! Your classmates want to know what you are up to. Send your information for the next publication to [email protected] Please do it today. 2015 Free Tax Assistance For the 2015 tax filing season, our MSA students will once again be participating in the FSA (facilitated self-assistance) program sponsored by the Internal Revenue Service. In the FSA program eligible taxpayers are assisted in the preparation of their federal and NC income tax returns. The FSA program is in lieu of the VITA program in which volunteers prepared the returns. Free tax preparation software was provided through myfreetaxes.com and was advertised throughout the university community including a link on the Cameron School webpage, http://csb.uncw.edu/act/ vita.htm . Our MSA volunteers will be available to instruct taxpayers on how to use the software and also answer tax questions during one of the four open labs to be held in CH 122. The open labs will be held February 13, March 6, March 20 and April 10, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm. Business Week 2015 by Randy Hanson Business Week 2015 will be on March 24 and 25, 2015 (Tuesday and Wednesday). We are busy planning for this important event. This is a great opportunity for our students to interact with professionals to learn about career opportunities in Accounting. The schedule can be viewed at http://csbapp.uncw.edu/csbsi/bwSchedule/schedule.aspx If you have any questions please contact Randy Hanson at [email protected] Page 5 Faculty Update Dr. GERALD K. DEBUSK, CPA, CMA, CGMA, is an Associate Professor of Accounting at University of North Carolina Wilmington. His 30 years of experience include his recent years in academia as an Assistant Professor at Appalachian State University and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and as a UC Foundation Associate Professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Gerald spent 15 years in accounting departments of manufacturing firms (serving in such positions as a Corporate Controller/Secretary-Treasurer, Plant Controller, and Cost Accounting Manager), plus two years in public accounting with a Big Eight firm. His industry experience included assignments in organizations pursuing Lean and JIT philosophies. Gerald’s academic research has focused on performance measurement, Lean Six Sigma, and Lean Accounting and has been published in numerous scholarly and practitioner journals. In 2008, Gerald’s and his co-author’s Balanced classmates want to know what you Scorecard research received Your international attention. Their study is frehave want toScorecard be sure quently cited and was featured in abeen 2010doing. articleWe in Balanced everyone is getting this newsletter, send Report, published by Palladium Group, an organization founded bysoRoband addresses to be added to the ert Kaplan and David Norton.names In 2009, Gerald won the Lean Enterprise mailing list to either [email protected] Institute's Excellence in Lean Accounting Professor Award. Gerald’s and or [email protected]. Please it his co-authors’ teaching innovation was recognized by the AICPAdo when today. they received honorable mention for the 2012 Mark Chain/FSA Award for Graduate Accounting Teaching Innovation. Gerald has a B.S. and Ph.D. in accounting from Virginia Tech and a MBA from Liberty University. He can be reached at [email protected]. Dr. VICTORIA HANSEN, CPA completed her Ph.D. at the University of South Carolina, her M.S. at the State University of New York at Albany, and her undergraduate studies at Marist College. Her research interests lie in the area of taxation. She has been published in the Journal of the American Taxation Association and has several ongoing research projects focusing on tax preparer judgment and decision making. Victoria is also a licensed Certified Public Accountant with experience working as a sole proprietor and as a Tax Manager for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. She has served as the Site Coordinator for the Voluntary Income Tax Assistance program of the Internal Revenue Service and as a member of the American Taxation Association national and regional conference committees. In her spare time, Victoria enjoys playing golf (poorly), spy novels, and appreciating good food, beer, and live sporting events. Beta Alpha Psi News by Jeremy Jacobs Chapter President UNCW’s Iota Alpha Chapter of Beta Alpha Psi is off to a great start this year. We have hosted numerous technical meetings with speakers from the public and private sectors, a service event, a social, a “reaching out” event, and free tutoring every week for introductory accounting students. We would like to thank the following firms and professionals who devoted their valuable time Fall semester: EY NCACPA Liberty Health Care Greer Walker McGladrey This year we welcomed Dr. Susan Hermanson and Dr. Gerald DeBusk as our faculty advisors. We thank Dr. Randall Hanson and Dr. James Whitworth for all of their hard work and dedication to the chapter last year. Our officers this year are: Fall 2014: Jeremy Jacobs (President), Kelly Larouche (VP of Reporting / Treasurer), Caley Boggs (VP of Communications), Rachael Wilson (VP of Service / Socials), Alan Pearce (VP of Meetings), Lori Curtsinger (VP of Websites). Spring 2015: Jeremy Jacobs (President), Caley Boggs (VP of Reporting / Treasurer), Chelsie Tefft (VP of Communications), Cierra Ray (VP of Service / Socials), Edward Desaussure (VP of Meetings), Lori Curtsinger (VP of Websites). Some highlights from the fall 2014 semester: “Beach Sweep” of Wrightsville at the Cleanup class graduation, tenBeach “Casino Night” themed Social years ago….des anyone have a “Reaching Out” copy it?presentation to introductory level accounting students Bill Poland – is senior financial accountant with We are pleased to announce thatMedical we inducted Insurance Group andour nine newMutual members in December during lives in Clayton, NC with his of midyear induction ceremony. The majority wife,willTami (a inducted UNCWinalum), our pledges still be April. and three amazing children. Taylor, at 6, is his oldest, Spring dates to remember: McKenzie is 4 and Garrett, the is 8 months. His most Thursday,baby, 4/23/2015 vivid of the MSA proBeta Alpha Psimemory Spring Induction Ceremony gram was the dedicated faculty Friday, 4/24/2015 and the exceptional job they Annual Accountancy and Business Law Golf Outing Page 6 Internship Update by Lorraine Lee Department of Accountancy and Business Law Cameron School of Business 601 S. College Road Wilmington, NC 28403-5901 Phone: 910-962-3509 Fax: 910-962-3663 Visit us at: www.csb.uncw.edu/acg/ We are very excited about the high quality class of interns that make up the roster for the 2014-2015 internship class. The 2014-2015 class consists of 26 students with an average GPA of 3.63 and an average GMAT of 560. Intern candidates started out the year with attendance at a mandatory orientation session that covered such topics as interviewing skills, dressing for success, networking, and how to utilize the Career Center. In addition, they prepared for their interviews by participating in mock interview sessions. The interns made their debut at Meet the Firms in late August and were actively involved in campus interviews throughout the fall semester. As of today, all but one of the interns is placed. We appreciate all of the firms that hired interns last year and those participating in this year’s program. We are sincerely grateful to all of our partners and organizations that are going the extra mile to provide our students with a valuable internship experience. We hope to continue our 100% placement this year, so please let me know if I can be of any assistance to you or your organization. If your organization has any needs for accounting interns this year or in future years, please do not hesitate to contact me by email at [email protected] or by phone at (910) 9624259 (office). Yes, I would like to support the Accountancy and Business Law Fund. My donation is enclosed I would like to pledge $_______ To be paid in installments of $_______ To be billed Annually Semi-Annually TOTAL GIFT AMOUNT: $_________ My firm/company will match my contribution by $_____ Make checks payable to: UNCW Department of Accounting and Business Law Or, please charge my: *Card #: ____________________________*Exp. Date: _______ *Name (as it appears on card): ____________________________ *Signature: ___________________________________________ Please print your name as you want it to appear in the UNCW donor listing: Name: ___________________________________________ Phone: ___________________________________________ E-mail: ___________________________________________ Address: _________________________________________ City, State, Zip: ___________________________________ Please return to: UNCW, Attention: David Mautz Department of Accountancy & Business Law, 601 S. College Road, Wilmington, NC 28403-5901
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