Relevant Research to Accounting Standard Setters and Regulators: Actively Bridging Accounting Practice and Scholarship Susan D. Krische Associate Professor Department of Accountancy College of Business University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1206 South Sixth Street, Champaign IL 61820 E-mail:
[email protected] Preliminary Comments appreciated November, 2009 I greatly appreciate the generous assistance of the many SEC staff with whom I interacted during my term as Academic Fellow with the Office of the Chief Accountant at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In particular, I thank Cathy Cole, Doug Parker, and Nili Shah for insightful conversations and comments related to the development of this paper. I also thank Robert Bloomfield, Donal Byard, Cathy Cole, Susan Curtis, Brooke Elliott, Annie Farrell, Jeff Hales, Roger Martin, Mark Peecher, Paul Polinski, Nili Shah, Steve Smith, Jeff Wilks, and brown-bag discussion participants at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for helpful comments and suggestions. Relevant Research to Accounting Standard Setters and Regulators: Actively Bridging Accounting Practice and Scholarship Abstract This paper helps bridge accounting practice and scholarship by identifying issues for consideration, and potential actions that could be taken, by individuals within the accounting academic community interested in better communicating the relevance of our academic research to accounting standard setters and regulators. I present an optimistic view that there is ample accounting research of potential interest to standard setters and regulators. However, the rigorous methodological standards to which we hold ourselves as academics make it unlikely that we can identify research ideas based on current regulatory agendas and reasonably expect the research to be sufficiently developed in time to impact the motivating debate.