Greg Jenkins receives award for study on brainstorming meetings and fraud detection

8 Sep 2014

Greg Jenkins, professor of accounting and information systems in the Pamplin College of Business, is one of three researchers who recently received the 2014 AAA/Deloitte Foundation Wildman Medal Award for their study on how brainstorming meetings can help auditors detect fraud.

Jenkins received the award, along with co-authors Joseph F. Brazel, of North Carolina State University, and Tina D. Carpenter, of the University of Georgia, for their article, “Auditors’ Use of Brainstorming in the Consideration of Fraud: Reports from the Field,” published in the July 2010 issue of The Accounting Review.

The award, sponsored by the Deloitte Foundation, was established in honor of a former partner of the firm and to encourage and recognize excellence in research that is relevant to accounting practice. This year’s medal was presented to Jenkins and his co-authors at the annual meeting of the American Accounting Association in August.

Their study, Jenkins says, can help auditors improve their decision-making processes related to fraud detection, as it identifies best practices from high-quality brainstorming meetings.

Such meetings are required on every audit to allow auditors to discuss the potential for fraud and responses to fraud risks. The benefits of brainstorming sessions, however, are not uniformly experienced. “Low-quality sessions likely incur the costs of such interactions without reaping the benefits,” the co-authors note.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), Jenkins says, has raised concerns about variations in the quality of brainstorming sessions and the effectiveness of auditors’ responses to fraud risks.

He and his co-authors developed a measure of brainstorming quality to examine whether and how it affects the relationships among fraud risk factors and assessments and auditors’ responses to fraud risks. They tested their measure with data from a field survey of auditors’ actual brainstorming sessions and fraud-related judgments for 179 audit engagements.

Jenkins, who holds the Curling and William S. Gay fellowships, has authored or co-authored articles in numerous academic and professional publications as well as textbooks and other course materials.

He serves as co-editor of Current Issues in Auditing. His recent professional activities include serving on a practice monitoring task force of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and chairing the Virginia Accounting and Auditing Conference. He has led a task force of the American Accounting Association that assisted the PCAOB with research related to auditor independence and mandatory audit firm rotation and served on an earlier task force that assisted the board with research related to revisions of quality control standards.

Before joining academe, Jenkins worked as an auditor with Ernst & Young and McGladrey. He received his Ph.D. from Virginia Tech and a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree from Appalachian State University.