2007 Distinguished Service in Auditing Award

Presented by Trevor Stewart

Ira Solomon (right) receives the 2007 Distinguished Service Award and Larry Rittenberg (left) receives the 2007 Auditing Section Outstanding Educator Award

The 2007 Distinguished Service in Auditing Award was presented to Ira Solomon, the R.C. Evans Endowed Chair in Business and Head of the Department of Accountancy at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). This award recognizes individuals who, over a period of at least twenty years, have made significant contributions to the profession, to the Auditing Section and to scholarship. It was first presented in 1981 to Ken Stringer and has continued ever since with an illustrious list of recipients.

Professor Solomon received his Ph.D. in Accounting from the University of Texas at Austin in May 1979 and joined the faculty of the Department of Accountancy at the University of Illinois four years later. Ira has published over thirty articles in a variety of scholarly journals and books. He is a co-author of Auditing Organizations Through a Strategic-Systems Lens, which received the Joint AAA/AICPA Collaboration Award. He has served as an Associate Editor of The Accounting Review and Accounting Horizons; and is currently on several editorial boards.

Ira has been an Audit Research Fellow at KPMG. He has served the Auditing Section as Research Director, as Vice-President (Academic), and as President. While research director he co-edited (with A. Rashad Abdel-khalik) the monograph Research Opportunities in Auditing: the Second Decade, which received the 1990 Deloitte Wildman award. Ira currently serves on the boards of the Illinois CPA Society and the AAA Education Committee.

Ira is known as a leading and innovative educator. He directed "Project Discovery," the undergraduate accountancy curriculum developed at the UIUC under a grant from the Accounting Education Change Commission. He has served as Managing Director-Academic for the KPMG/UIUC Business Measurement Case Development & Research Program, whose case studies are widely used. Ira was recognized by the AAA as the 1997 Outstanding Auditing Educator. The Auditing Section has recognized Ira three times for Outstanding Dissertation Supervision, most recently in 2003. And in 2005 he received the Innovations in Audit Education Award from the section.

The members of this year's selection committee were Scott Showalter (Chair), Bill Felix and Tim Bell.

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