McKenna at the AAA Annual Meeting and Ethics Symposium

Are you an academic who will be attending the AAA meeting in San Diego?

As many of you know, I have worn many hats during my career: Industry executive, internal auditor, Big 4 consultant, Managing Director/Practice Leader, entrepreneur, professional association chapter president, journalist, and now teacher and academic.

I’ve paid a lot of professional association dues over the years and attended many, many conferences — as an organizer, speaker, panelist, moderator and sponsor!

I have been a member of the American Accounting Association for several years now, ever since I started teaching at American University and hoped I would be doing more academic-style writing and research in the future. In the meantime I wrote about others’ academic research — for Forbes, American Banker, Chicago Booth Review, and MarketWatch/WSJ.

I’ve given speeches to AAA meetings as a journalist, at annual and mid-year sectionals, many times long before being accepted as a fellow academic member. I spoke to students, faculty, and PhD students at universities about non-GAAP metrics and auditor independence, in particular.

I’ve spoken to CFAs, journalism graduate programs, Stigler Center Fellows, and about auditors to risk management and compliance professions, lawyers and more lawyers and at law schools!

That’s the Compliance Week Conference in DC in 2012 with SEC’s Nili Shah and Bruce Pounder giving the SEC Financial Reporting Update. Nili is now Executive Technical Director of the IFRS Foundation. https://francinemckenna.com/2012/05/30/mckenna-at-compliance-week-annual-conference-2012/

Some of those presentations were not welcome by some who, for example, refused to be on a panel with me, walked in the other direction when I approached them in a group or at a reception, heckled me, or, in one case, decided based on pressure from the Big 4 to dis-invite me altogether.

Oh well, if that’s the worst I’ll bear from my words over the years I’ll take it. I know how to separate from the crowd and make my own fun.

I have always supported others’ research and my work has been cited many times in research in the accounting/audit and law academy. Now I am doing research of my own, publishing teaching cases, getting quoted, and preparing articles for publication in outlets more focused on the profession than my previous work at The Financial Times, Time Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, Boston Review, and Reuters BreakingViews.

This year, after a few via zoom, I will be in San Diego, live, for the AAA Annual Meeting and the Ethics Symposium, which is a pre-game for the full conference starting this weekend.

I am moderating the lead-off panel on Sunday for the Ethics Symposium on journal editors:

8:00 am – 8:50 am           Opening Session – GS room

                                            Publishing Advice & Post-pandemic Ethical Issues

                                            Behavioral Ethics – 1.0

Moderator: Francine McKenna, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Panelists:

Charles Bailey, Behavioral Research in Accounting

Amy Hageman, Accounting and the Public Interest

Tara Shawver, Research on Professional Responsibility and Ethics in Accounting 

And then I will be speaking on a panel at end of day, closing session:  

3:15 pm – 4:30 pm           Panel Session – GS room

Session 5.1 Which Side Are They On? Do Auditors Still Protect the Public?

                                            Behavioral Ethics – 1.5

 Moderator: Steven Mintz, California Polytechnic State Univ. – San Luis Obispo

                                            Panelists:

Francine McKenna, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Tony Menendez, Loyola Marymount University

Steven Mintz, California Polytechnic State Univ. – San Luis Obispo

Sri Ramamoorti, University of Dayton

If you will be attending the conference, come see us or say hello after.

© Francine McKenna, The Digging Company LLC, 2022