Welcome to AccelPro Audit, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development.  Today we’re featuring a conversation with Jim Pelletier, Senior Product manager at Wolters Kluwer. 

Pelletier talks us through gathering effective data for ESG reporting, why it's important for auditors to develop relationships with other operational leaders, and how they can develop mature processes and controls around data collection and reporting.

He stresses the need for transparency in audit. “And the way we get there is by having reporting standards in place, so it's understood what an organization is required to report. What metrics need to be in place? What is the type of data that the public needs to be able to see and the investors need to be able to understand? Those standards need to be in place.”

Welcome to AccelPro Audit, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development.  Today we’re featuring a conversation with Danielle Brannock, Manager of Data Analytics at Intuitive Surgical. 

Brannock talks about the huge increase in efficiency which automation has brought to data analytics, liberating many professionals from rote tasks and allowing them to put their minds to creative problem-solving. Brannock says, 

“What automation allows us to do is focus on strategic value adding work. It's going to free up your auditors to start looking at the outputs, making judgment calls, and then providing value to the business in a different way.”

Welcome to AccelPro Audit, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation with Mike Callino, Senior Director of Internal Audit at Braze. 

We discuss the benefits of introducing new technologies into the audit process. Callino explains how implementing new methodologies, such as Agile, can increase successful collaboration across teams, as well as overall efficiency. He also foresees the increased use of AI in the auditing process, and claims it is already making data analysis more accurate and efficient. 

“AI can streamline our audit tests, our audit fieldwork, and the like. And this is all within a controlled environment that we have within our GRC software. It's going to allow us to help write controls better, help process flow out better, write reports in a more timely manner, and help analyze big data sets.”

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

Send your comments and career questions to [email protected]. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.

If your colleagues in any sector of the audit field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members

Welcome to AccelPro Audit, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation with Chanpreet Singh, Director of Internal Audit & SOX at Ouster.

An accomplished risk and control leader, Singh provides valuable insight on how artificial intelligence and automation is improving the audit space, as well as what auditors need to know to keep up with these technological changes. Staying up to date on new resources, honing the skills needed to use those resources, and adapting to a ‘what if’ mindset can go a long way towards making technology work for you. 

As an example, Singh says, “If you think about the revenue cycle, every deal is going to have a sales order. Now, if all of that is digital, you can set up an analytics tool, which can throw exceptions. If an order doesn't meet, for example, a customer purchase order, you can catch it even before you fulfill it.”

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

Send your comments and career questions to [email protected]. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.

If your colleagues in any sector of the audit field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members

Welcome to AccelPro Audit, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation with Howard Scheck.

A dual CPA/JD, Scheck is both an accountant and a lawyer, which has led to a fascinating career. Currently, Scheck is a partner with the StoneTurn Group where he helps firms with financial reporting related issues and investigations. Previously, Scheck was on the regulatory side of things, first working as a lawyer in the SEC’s Division of Enforcement for many years, before serving as Chief Accountant in the same division. 

In this episode, we discuss trends in SEC enforcement actions that auditors should be aware of (including an increased focus on non-GAAP issues like cybersecurity and controls), landmark cases and penalties handed out in 2023, Scheck’s estimation of the incidence of fraud, and how auditors can best stay up to day on the SEC’s evolving agenda. We also dig into Scheck’s unique career path and what advice he has for others considering combining law and accounting.

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

Send your comments and career questions to [email protected]. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.

If your colleagues in any sector of the audit field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members

Welcome to AccelPro Audit, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation with Veena Brown, Associate Professor of Accounting and program director at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. 

We discuss the need to address unconscious bias in the audit and accounting industries, as well as support and encourage students as they navigate their way towards these careers. Brown, a first-generation immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago and the first of her family to receive a bachelor’s degree, emphasizes that the biggest barrier to entry for those wishing to join the industry is lack of support and training. She posits that revamping the curriculum to include a contribution, additive, transformative, and social action approach to inclusion will allow students to see the industry as more accessible and relevant.

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

Send your comments and career questions to [email protected]. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.

If your colleagues in any sector of the audit field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members

Welcome to AccelPro Audit, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation about professional skepticism and fraud. Our guest is Joe Brazel, Distinguished Professor of Accounting and North Carolina State University. 

Given auditors are paid by the very companies they’re supposed to be checking up on, complicated incentives are baked into the very structure of the profession. No one has yet discovered a better structure for the industry, so auditors must negotiate tricky tradeoffs from the start. How do you keep clients happy while maintaining an appropriate level of professional skepticism? When is an inconsistency or concern serious enough to warrant further investigation? And can new AI tools play a role in helping to unravel some of these knotty problems? 

These are the questions at the heart of my conversation with Brazel, who runs through what his research reveals about how audit leaders and audit committees can best encourage healthy skepticism, the promise and perils of new digital tools and the advice he always gives his students about charting their careers.

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

Send your comments and career questions to [email protected]. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.

If your colleagues in any sector of the audit field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members

Welcome to AccelPro Audit, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation with Tim Coville, associate professor of accounting at St. John’s University. 

ESG is an undoubtedly hot (if controversial) topic in the business world as companies and regulators wrestle with what businesses should disclose about their environmental and social impact, and exactly how. But despite all this noise and attention on the topic, CPA firms in North America currently handle a relatively small slice of ESG reporting and assurance work — just 15% according to Coville’s research. The rest goes to engineering firms and other consultants. 

In this interview, Coville discusses why public accountants don’t win more business related to ESG reporting, how the evolving regulatory landscape might change the situation and what auditors should be doing now to prepare to handle more of this sort of work in the future. Putting on his educator’s hat, Coville also reveals what advice he gives students on finding a fulfilling path in the world of audit and how working in the ESG space has helped him find meaning in his career.

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

Send your comments and career questions to [email protected]. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.

If your colleagues in any sector of the audit field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members

Welcome to AccelPro Audit, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation with Mark Beasley, Professor of Enterprise Risk Management and the Director of the Enterprise Risk Management Initiative at the Poole College of Management. 

Beasley is an innovative thought leader in the area of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) and its integration with strategy and corporate governance. The ERM framework grew out of previous approaches to risk assessment that viewed risks in silos. ERM, says Dr. Beasely is trying to “close the gaps that exist between the silos.” Today, we talk about the basics of ERM, and how external auditors may benefit from better understanding their client's approach to risk management.

“A lot of times, the C-suite, the way they think about more external risk is what I would call ad hoc risk management in the sense of, oh, I thought about this when I was running this morning, I was taking a shower, oh, I saw that on the Wall Street Journal front page. It's very unstructured. ERM is going to take you through a process to force explicit conversation and discussions in a structured way about what kinds of risks could emerge that can affect our strategy.”

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

Send your comments and career questions to [email protected]. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.

If your colleagues in any sector of the audit field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members

Welcome to AccelPro Audit, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation with Matt Johnson, U. S. National Technology Assurance Leader at KPMG. 

Thanks to artificial intelligence, blockchain and the rise of remote work and advanced analytics, the technology companies use to get work done and serve customers is evolving at an incredible pace. How are tech specialists in the audit field keeping up? Over a 20+ career at KPMG, Matt Johnson has been helping both clients and internal teams adapt to tech innovation and avoid technology-related risks. 

He talked to AccelPro Audit about how digital transformation is changing tech assurance, executives’ increasing concern about cybersecurity risks and the SEC’s new rules around reporting them, KPMG’s creative efforts to fill the talent pipeline, as well as his own personal career journey. While Johnson offers plenty of insight about the current tech landscape and developing your own career, perhaps his most passionate piece of advice is more strategic — focusing on how auditors can find the long-term motivation to keep learning in such a fast-changing field.

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AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

Send your comments and career questions to [email protected]. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.

If your colleagues in any sector of the audit field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members