Vikram Chellappa

Vikram Chellappa is doing his MS-EECS degree at KU. His E&Y Faculty Mentor is Professor Mike Ettredge. Vikram will be working on the following research ideas:
(1) Use FRAANK (if possible) to gather audit fee and non-audit fee data from recent proxy statements for about 1,300 firms. This needs to be done in the next month or so. These data would be used for a research project, although not a tech-related one. The research project examines the timing of auditor switches away from AA following Enron.
(2) Create an Excel template that can import XBRL-tagged financial statements, and compute various ratios automatically using XBRL tags to 'find' the relevant data items. This project could occupy the remaining semesters.

Rajeev M. Pillai

Rajeev M. Pillai is doing his MBA at KU. He will be working with Professor Vern Richardson on getting corporate governance variables around the dates of restatements. Professor Vern Richardson plans to complete a paper based on this research for the Journal of Accounting Research conference

Katy Wood

Katy Wood research effort will deal with the issue mandatory auditor switching, which is currently the subject of several bills wending their way through the legislature. Specifically, Professor Scholz, and Professor Zoe-Vonna of USC will be looking at whether companies that report misstated financial results have relatively new or old auditors (relative to a matched sample) and whether old or new auditors are likely to be associated with discovering and reporting the misstatement. This research will provide opportunities to the E&Y Student Fellow interested in auditing to become familiar with the communications between the audit firms and the SEC, the reasons companies switch auditors and the costs involved as well as the political environment in which the firms now operate. There may also be opportunities to work with the AAA sponsored independence data.

Charles Gruber, MSBIS, KU

Charles Gruber is a MSBIS student at the University of Kansas. He will be working with Professor Tom Roberts as his E&Y Faculty Mentor. Charles was a 2002 business graduate of KU and was a two time All American in track for the Jayhawks. This year, he will be assisting in the development of several on-line survey instruments that are involved with research projects that include IT personnel trust, equity, motivation, and communication. He will also help with an experiment involving a comparison of face-to-face, asynchronous, and synchronous communication that will be conducted in BUS 248 using a Group Decision Support System (GDSS) and system development heuristics. He will also be involved in the setting up of a new networking laboratory that will be used to teach BUS 651 and for future research experiments in networking.

Vineet Dhamija, PhD Student in AIS, KU

Vineeet Dhamija is a PhD student in Accounting Information Systems area. His will be working with Professor Raj Srivastava as his E&Y Faculty Mentor. He will test and validate the FRAANK agents reliability and check the synonym database for reliability.