I thank the members of the Auditing Section for giving me the opportunity to serve as your President during 2002–2003. I owe much of my professional success to the opportunities the Section has provided me. I hope to return some of my debt to the Section by serving you effectively during the next year.

As I take the reins of our Section, I can tell you that it is in good health, thanks in no small part to the excellent leadership provided by my predecessor, Michael Bamber. I thank the outgoing members of the Section’s Executive Committee for their excellent service over the past few years: Stan Biggs, Past President; Abe Akresh, Vice President–Practice; and Audrey Gramling, Secretary. Let me also welcome the Executive Committee’s new members: Jean C. Bedard, Vice President–Academic; George Krull, Vice President–Practice; and Bill Dilla, Secretary. The Executive Committee’s continuing members are: Michael Bamber, Past President; Rick Tubbs, Treasurer; and Andy Bailey, Historian. I am blessed to have such an able and dedicated group of people around me.

The Auditing Section was well represented at the AAA Annual Meeting in San Antonio. There were 30 papers presented at concurrent sessions. In addition, six papers submitted to the Auditing Section were accepted for presentation in interdisciplinary sessions and there were nine Forum papers. The Section owes its gratitude to Randy Elder, Director of the 2002 Annual Meeting Committee; Bryan Church, Assistant Director; and Bill Heninger, CPE Director; and to the many volunteers who reviewed the 77 submitted papers. You might find it interesting that, although submissions to the Annual Meeting were down by over seven percent, submissions to the Auditing Section were up by almost seven percent. Bryan Church, Director of the 2003 Annual Meeting Committee, has a call for submissions in this issue, and Mark Zimbelman has a call for CPE proposals. Please remember that the more papers that are submitted to the Auditing Section, the more sessions the Section will be allocated. Because Hawaii is obviously a very desirable location, please consider submitting your work to the Auditing Section and encourage your colleagues and Ph.D. students to do the same.

On behalf of all the Section’s members, I want to take this opportunity to publicly thank Michael Bamber for the excellent job he did in leading the Section last year. The financial condition of the Section was quite precarious when Mike assumed the presidency. Mike, primarily working with Rick Tubbs (the Section’s treasurer), took the lead in: (1) putting before the members a dues increase of $15, which passed overwhelmingly in Orlando, and (2) moving The Auditor’s Report to electronic dissemination. These two steps have stabilized the Section’s financial condition and should enable us to begin rebuilding our depleted cash reserves. I also thank Bill Messier, Editor, Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory, for deciding to forgo much of the $20,000 stipend that the Section typically provides editors for hiring an editorial assistant.

During his year as president, Mike also took the lead in getting the Executive Committee to approve the creation of a new award, the Innovation in Auditing and Assurance Education Award. The inaugural award will be given at the Section’s 2003 Midyear Conference in Huntington Beach. Please remember that this award is intended to be broad—it covers not only educational cases, but also classroom innovations of all types. If you are doing innovative things in the classroom, please consider applying for this award next year, and if you know of others doing innovative things in the classroom, please nominate them.

Finally, Mike was interested in expanding Auditing Section members’ involvement with assurance services. The Section’s Education Committee, under last year’s chair, Bill Dilla, has developed a questionnaire to assess the extent to which assurance services are being covered in our courses. This year’s Education Committee plans to electronically distribute this questionnaire to the membership sometime during the year.

The phrase “may you live in interesting times” certainly captures the accounting and auditing events of the past year. These events have profound implications for us as auditing educators and researchers. With the recent passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the imminent beginning of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, we, as auditing educators and researchers, are in a unique position to: (1) provide research with significant public policy implications, (2) contribute to the debate on ways to improve audit performance, and (3) share with students the excitement of being part of a profession that, although tarred by recent events, is so obviously essential to the public good. If the events of the past year have had any salutary effect, questions about the value of a high-quality audit have presumably been put to rest for the foreseeable future.

My initiatives for the upcoming year have been developed to dovetail with the unprecedented changes facing our profession. My initiatives include: (1) obtaining more exposure with regulators, standard setters, practitioners, and the financial press for auditing-related research, especially research published in AJPT; and (2) increasing Section members’ access to research data and subjects and providing information to members on existing opportunities for further development of their research skills. The Section’s Research Committee (under the leadership of Steve Salterio) will focus on both of these initiatives, and the Auditing Standards Committee (under the leadership of Brian Ballou) and the Communications Committee (led by Jeff Payne) also will focus on the first initiative.

My other initiatives for this year are to provide more value to Section members at teaching-oriented schools and to increase the Section’s membership, particularly among faculty at teaching-oriented schools, international faculty, and practitioners. The Education Committee (led by Don Tidrick), the Communications Committee, and the Auditing Standards Committee all will be working to help the Section provide more value to members, especially those at teaching-oriented schools. The Membership and Regional Coordinators Committee (under the leadership of Bob Tucker) will look to increase the Section’s membership. This year, in addition to regional coordinators, this committee has two practitioner members and three international members. I am hopeful that these new members will help the committee to reach out to international faculty and practitioners. I will report on the status of my initiatives at the 2003 Midyear Conference in January.

Any successes that the Section achieves this year will be totally due to the talents and hard work of the many Section members who staff our committees. The Section’s successes are their successes. My sincerest thanks to all Section members who are giving of their most precious resource, time, to help make the Section better for all of us.

Finally, let me close by extending a warm invitation to attend the Auditing Section’s ninth annual Midyear Conference (MYC) next January 16–18 in Huntington Beach, California. Bob Ramsay, Chair of the 2003 Midyear Conference Program Committee, and his committee are putting together a superb program. The MYC will include two plenary sessions, both of which I believe will be terrific. On Friday morning, Mary Pat McCarthy, KPMG’s vice-chair of their Information, Communications & Entertainment line of business, will talk to us about the “future of audit methodology.” On Saturday, the plenary session is a panel entitled “What have we learned? Where do we go?,” which we believe is responsive to the events of the past year. Panelists include: Bill Kinney, The University of Texas at Austin; Chuck Noski, Vice Chairman of AT&T and former CFO; and Aulana Peters, former SEC commissioner and POB member. The MYC also will have a session sponsored by the Auditing Standards Board, a session focusing on internal audit issues, education-related sessions, and numerous sessions devoted to the presentation of research results. And our location, the Hilton Hotel in Huntington Beach, is tremendous—the hotel faces the Pacific Ocean. More information on the 2003 MYC, including the registration form, is included in this issue. I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible in Huntington Beach next January.

The day before the MYC, the Section will sponsor our annual Doctoral Consortium. Mark DeFond, Chair of the 2003 Doctoral Consortium Committee, has put together a program that would benefit any doctoral student, regardless of research interests and/or year in the program. Due to the generosity of the KPMG Foundation, the consortium is free to doctoral students, including one free hotel night and meals on the day of the consortium. Please encourage your doctoral students to attend the consortium, and tell your doctoral students that the registration fee for the balance of the MYC is only $25. New scholars are the lifeblood of our profession, so let’s do all we can to encourage Ph.D. students and new faculty to attend the 2003 Midyear Conference.

Thanks again for giving me the opportunity to serve you as President this year. Please feel free to contact me (jcarcell@utk.edu; (865) 974-1757) regarding ways that the Section can better serve you.