The study was conducted by Seattle University senior Mindi Waldmar and touched on a host of topics, from e-commerce and a new age of auditing, to risk management and the Internet. As brick and mortar firms undergo e-transformations, so too must the accounting industry, said Waldmar.
Accountants are in the driver's seat.
The paper was awarded the Thomas J. Burns National Student Seminar Superior Manuscript Award as the best of all the papers submitted at a national conference organized by Beta Alpha Psi, a national scholastic and professional accounting fraternity. They must make e-business a priority and must be confident and willing to take a risk in order to succeed. For a start, firms need to look at employee attraction and retention, which has become an industry-wide problem. As a result, accounting firms should be changing the types of services they provide and expand the ways in which their services are delivered. For example, for a service firm, such as an accounting firm, e-commerce should involve online access to data, reports and information.