Symposium to address urgent auditing-fraud issues

LAWRENCE -- Jim Heintz and his colleagues were busy planning a symposium to address financial statements and auditing fraud long before the Enron story broke.

"We hatched this idea over a year ago, and it just so happened that along came this scandal with Enron and others," said Heintz, director of accounting and information systems in the School of Business at the University of Kansas.

The Deloitte & Touche/University of Kansas Symposium on Auditing Problems, which will take place on the KU campus Thursday, May 9, and Friday, May 10, will bring together some of the nation's leading financial researchers and practitioners to address these urgent issues.

The symposium has been sponsored by the national accounting firm Deloitte & Touche and hosted by KU biannually since 1972.

Heintz said the findings that come from this symposium would help revolutionize financial reporting and auditing practices.

"Based on the level of people that will be here, much of what is discussed should have an immediate impact on the decisions being made in the accounting industry," he said.

Along with several KU professors and other academic researchers from across the nation, representatives from all of the "Big Five" accounting firms and the chair of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants' Fraud Task Force will be at the symposium.

In fact, Heintz said, he received so much interest in this timely symposium that he had to extend the registration cut-off from 50 people to 70.

Obviously, he said, people within the industry are ready for change.

"We will definitely see some of the cutting-edge research that has been done throughout the country on very specific things that we as a discipline can do to detect fraud, prevent it and suggest how some of these points can be enforced," he said.

Among the topics the symposium will address:

 • Research on auditors' detection of fraudulent financial statements -- implications for audit practice

 • Challenges in implementing the new fraud standard

 • Fraud task force developments

 • Using audit technology to proactively detect fraud

 • Auditor switching and fraud detection

 • Auditor industry specialization and fraudulent financial reporting.