Five accounting students from the Marriott School at Brigham Young University cooly handled the pressures faced by auditors — placing second in national competition. Graduate students Brent Pugh, Troy Sheen, Heather Madsen, Josh Rowley and Ryan Oviatt participated in the Deloitte & Touche Foundation’s Fifth Annual National Student Case Study Seminar. The seminar placed teams in practical business settings with case studies developed by the firm’s accounting research department.
“We felt like real auditors,” Pugh said. “We immediately became immersed in solving a case about startup costs and felt all the pressures that a client would put on us.” The student teams received the competition’s case problems three weeks before traveling to the national seminar in Scottsdale, Arizona.
One pressure the BYU team faced was deciding which costs to expense or capitalize. Through researching accounting material, collaborating with a faculty advisor and consulting with a Deloitte & Touche manager, the students produced a winning solution.
“Deloitte and Touche prepared these cases based on complicated business transactions and audit issues that the firm had previously encountered with clients,” said David Cottrell, assistant professor of accounting at the Marriott School and the team’s faculty advisor. “These cases were difficult and the students had to put in a lot of hard work to develop their case solution and presentation.”
In addition to generating a solution to their case study, the BYU students prepared a presentation to be judged by a panel of active and retired Deloitte & Touche partners and faculty advisors. In order to best illustrate their conclusions, the team crossed over to the right side of their brains for a dose of creativity.
“Watching an accounting presentation is not the most exciting thing in the world,” Pugh said. “Wetossed around several ideas and decided to visually illustrate our case solution.”
A Barbie doll was chosen to represent employee training, a color swatch represented interior design costs and a toy oven represented long-lived assets.
“If an item was to be expensed, we would place it inside a bag. If it was to be capitalized, it was placed on the floor beside the bag,” Pugh said. “It was a simple idea, but we knew it worked because all of the judges referred back to our example in the question and answer session.”
Regional finalists participating in the seminar included BYU, Howard University, University of Illinois, Indiana University, University of Notre Dame and University of Washington. The teams were ranked according to their presentation performance and their ability to resolve accounting issues in the case studies. Howard University finished first at the seminar with each member of its team receiving a $1,000 scholarship. BYU’s second place finish earned each member a $500 scholarship.
“While textbooks provide a great wealth of information and can teach the fundamentals of accounting, students also need to learn from real-life situations,” said Douglas M. McCracken, chairman of both Deloitte &Touche and the Deloitte & Touche Foundation.
The School of Accountancy and Information Systems, part of BYU’s Marriott School, offers master’s degrees in accountancy and information systems. Public Accounting Report ranks the school’s master of accountancy and undergraduate accountancy programs third in the nation. The Marriott School is dedicated to educating men and women of faith, character and professional ability who will become outstanding managers and leaders throughout the world.
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Writer: Carrie Beckstead (801) 378-1512