A small group of students are on their way to the study of accounting at N.C . State more prestigious than it ever has been. A team of four from the Poole College of Management is competing against the nine other teams from universities all over the country in the 2011 AICPA Accounting Competition.
Under the name ‘Wolfpack in the Black’, the team consisting of Alan Perry, Seanna Robey , Amanda Dew and Brian Jones is a force to be reckoned with.
“I always thought our colors were just red and white,” Perry chuckled as his teammate, Seanna Robey , reassured him of it being one of our school colors that they had incorporated into the name, “We’re finding answers to their fraud problems that’s how we got the name, because black is one of our school colors and to be in the black (in accounting) is to be making money. So it’s a pun off that.”
The fraud problems Robey was referring to is the one in the fictitious scenario given by the AICPA in the first round of the challenge. The students in the preliminaries must be teams of four and have written a 750-word executive summary of the situation as they would in the job world. This summary could be submitted online by any team interested in the competition, and is then judged. The top 10 would go to the semi-finals. Out of the 215 teams N.C . State is now in the 10.
The strategic scenario set out by the AICPA is to challenge the students to do what they would essentially do for a real employer. To do this further, for the second round the top 10 teams were sent new information that had just come into play in the mock-up. They then had to write a 1,500-word summary, accompanied by a video about 5-6 minutes giving information a high fraud risk analysis consultant would tell the fictitious company.
“We found out all this new information for the second round that added to the scenario, like a potentially illegal bribery made to a foreign officials could be going on, so we give a set of recommendations to this company to reduce risk of fraud,” Perry said. “The final round we might get even more information.”
Each member of the team had a hand in every part thus far. One member giving advice and double-checking the other, it seemed like each member brought a piece to the table.
“Amanda (Dew) helped with writing, especially with the first round, but she also did all of our video editing. She’s really good at that stuff so she took care of that well.” Perry said. “Brian (Jones) helped with the writing but Brian’s also, the best communicator out of all of us. He is really good at public speaking and selling stuff, so that’s why he did the opening and closing of our video presentation. All in all everyone helped with everything. We’d give feedback to each other, it wasn’t like a one specialty thing, and we had to work as a team.”
The idea of using only local resources and personnel would seem daring in any other team project but this is looked as a fun test of self reliance, Perry explained.
“The reason I like this particular competition compared to other kinds of competitions because the AICPA did not give us any criteria on what they were judging us on. We had to figure out what they were looking for. So we had to do all the research ourselves. No one told us where to go to or where to start,” Perry said.
The work and time put in will hopefully pay off. Anyone; student, staff, random pedestrian, can vote for this team to push them past the preliminaries and allow them the opportunity to be in the top 3 teams, who are flown to Washington D.C . and compete for the number spot and the 1st place prize of $10,000. Robey went on to tell about the work they had put in which has made them crave the win more.
“We’ve put in at least 100 hours for just the first round, and the professors are very proud of us. We’ve spent a number of hours in the accounting department pulling information out of professors. So winning this would help elevate N.C . State’s accounting degree plan.”
