Headlines
Ambassador of Belgium to present 2021 Dole Lecture
LAWRENCE – The Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas has announced that the guest for the 2021 Dole Lecture will be Jean-Arthur Régibeau, the ambassador of Belgium to the United States. This year’s lecture will take place at 7 p.m. May 5 on the institute’s YouTube channel. “Ambassador Régibeau is only the second seated ambassador to be a guest at the institute,” Dole Institute Director Bill Lacy said. “As the world begins to emerge from the COVID pandemic, he will bring a unique perspective on what lies ahead for U.S. and European relations.”
Audit effort affected by partner rotation and board inspections, study finds
LAWRENCE — The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) requires that audit firms and their clients rotate engagement partners every five years to avoid a long-term corporate relationship in which auditors lose sight of objectivity. But a new study by a University of Kansas researcher finds that experienced auditors exert reduced effort prior to mandatory partner rotation, which also can reduce audit effectiveness.
Spencer Museum hosts virtual event with MacArthur Fellows
LAWRENCE — A virtual event hosted by the Spencer Museum of Art at 4 p.m. April 26 will present internationally acclaimed artist Janine Antoni in conversation with other researchers about how to better understand and connect to our bodies through multiple perspectives. A free livestream of this event is available through the Spencer Museum’s website.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Zac Walker, Dole Institute of Politics, 785-864-9319, [email protected], @DoleInstitute
Ambassador of Belgium to present 2021 Dole Lecture
LAWRENCE – The Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas has announced that the guest for the 2021 Dole Lecture will be Jean-Arthur Régibeau, the ambassador of Belgium to the United States. This year’s lecture will take place at 7 p.m. May 5 on the institute’s YouTube channel.
“Ambassador Régibeau is only the second seated ambassador to be a guest at the institute,” Dole Institute Director Bill Lacy said. “As the world begins to emerge from the COVID pandemic, he will bring a unique perspective on what lies ahead for U.S. and European relations.”
Régibeau presented his credentials to the U.S. in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 17, 2020, and took up his duties as ambassador. He entered the office as major transitions dominated the global political and economic landscape, including the presidential administration change in the U.S. and the worldwide vaccination effort to end the pandemic. He will discuss these massive changes, focusing on Belgium, the European Union and what role the U.S. will play.
Régibeau joined the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1998. He was the diplomatic adviser to the Minister of Defense from 1999 to 2002, and he went on to be first secretary at the Belgian Embassy in Berlin. From 2003 to 2007, Régibeau returned to Brussels as head of the Private Office of the Minister of Defense. In 2007, he was appointed director general in charge of Multilateral Organizations at the Foreign Ministry. In this capacity, he managed some aspects of the Belgian presidency of the EU in 2010. From 2012 to 2016, he also was deputy commissioner for the commemoration of World War I. In 2016, he became ambassador to the Russian Federation, Armenia, Belarus and Uzbekistan.
The Dole Lecture is a public event headlined by a national or international figure discussing an aspect of current politics or policy. Held each spring, it commemorates April 14, 1945, when Bob Dole was critically wounded while serving in Italy during World War II. The Dole Lecture honors Dole’s courageous recovery and continuing commitment to serve the nation. Previous guests include HP Chief Executive Carly Fiorina, former U.S. Rep. Lynn Jenkins, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, Pulitzer Price-winning journalist Bob Woodward, news anchor Tom Brokaw and former President Bill Clinton.
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Contact: Jon Niccum, KU News Service, 785-864-7633, [email protected]
Audit effort affected by partner rotation and board inspections, study finds
LAWRENCE — Audit firms and their clients should enjoy a friendly relationship. Just not too friendly.
That’s why the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) requires such companies to rotate engagement partners every five years.
But a new study by Amanda Winn, assistant professor of business at the University of Kansas, examines the effects of these regulations on the efforts of auditors. Her article titled “The Joint Effects of Partner Rotation and PCAOB Inspections on Audit Effort” finds that experienced auditors exert reduced effort prior to mandatory partner rotation and increased effort when PCAOB inspection risk is high.
It appears in Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory.
“With partner rotation, they are looking ahead to this process and starting to disinvest their time with the client as their relationship with the client winds up,” Winn said. “Whereas expecting that you will be inspected by the PCAOB has the opposite effect — you ramp up your final effort. As a result, anticipating a PCAOB inspection offsets the effect of mandatory rotation on partners’ final-year effort.”
For an everyday parallel of partner rotation, she compares it to a worker who has decided to switch jobs.
“There are competing arguments as to how you will approach those final few days,” she said.
“It might be, ‘Well, I’m actually going to be working a ton more because I need to get this transition ready and help out the team until I leave.’ Or it might be, ‘I’m unmotivated now, and I’m looking ahead to my next job.’”
Her study suggests potential problems surface during the rotation transition, which could be reduced if the PCAOB inspects those years at higher rates. The board could perceive this as a risk factor that makes it want to select those firms ending engagements for inspection.
Mandatory partner rotation was established when Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. The motivating force behind the regulation was the idea that audit firms and their clients were becoming too entangled, with auditors accused of not being able to form independent assessments about the financial statements.
“Over the years there have been all kinds of proposals to deal with that, including making the whole audit firm switch every so often to keep these long-lasting relationships from forming,” she said.
Exacerbating this problem is some of the most highly visible scandals involving corporations happened when auditors stayed for years or even decades with the same client.
Winn became interested in this topic when interviewing audit partners and Canadian Public Accountability Board members as part of a different project looking into the biggest recent changes to how the audit practice works. She said many auditors felt pressured to provide higher-quality reviews while simultaneously being forced to sever established relationships that made this process more efficient.
To provide richer insights on the effects of these regulations, Winn’s study also drills down on what specific activities auditors plan to change in advance of rotation and inspections.
“I find that both regulations cause auditors to increase time spent on documentation, consistent with auditors’ concerns about the cost of compliance. I find no strong evidence that auditors also increase time spent on other activities, like testing, that can help catch errors and irregularities. In fact, anticipating mandatory rotation causes auditors to spend less time on these testing activities,” she said.
Winn worked as an auditor at KPMG for several years before entering academia and eventually returning to her KU alma mater in 2020 as a professor. Her methodological area of expertise is experimental research: half audit and half financial accounting topics.
She notes how other papers are coming out now that reinforce her “Joint Effects” findings by using proprietary private data about how auditors are altering their behavior to fit with these regulatory motivations.
“I hope my paper sheds some light on the costs and benefits of the regulations overall and provides some more nuance to those other complementary papers,” she said. “It’s important to understand where the effort is being spent and what kinds of behaviors are changing.”
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Contact: Elizabeth Kanost, Spencer Museum of Art, 785-864-0142, [email protected], @SpencerMuseum
Spencer Museum hosts virtual event with MacArthur Fellows
LAWRENCE — A virtual event hosted by the Spencer Museum of Art at 4 p.m. April 26 will present internationally acclaimed artist Janine Antoni in conversation with other researchers about how to better understand and connect to our bodies through multiple perspectives. A free livestream of this event is available through the Spencer Museum’s website.
The event features MacArthur fellows Antoni, who has explored the body through sculpture, movement and photography for decades; and John Rich, whose work in public health focuses on healing and the Black body. They will be joined in conversation by artists Ingrid Bachmann and Dario Robleto, whose work is featured in the Spencer Museum’s exhibition “Healing, Knowing, Seeing the Body.”
This program is organized by the Spencer Museum’s Integrated Arts Research Initiative (IARI), which facilitates annual inquiries that explore issues across the arts, sciences and humanities. This year’s inquiry — Tending to the Body — uses images, sound, video and text to explore how we care for our bodies through submissions from various artists and scholars on a virtual platform. The livestream event is embedded in the digital space, allowing attendees to reference inquiry contributions before, during and after the conversation.
IARI is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This program is supported in part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
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