Four new members of The Accounting Hall of Fame (AHOF) will be inducted by the American Accounting Association (AAA) in August 2026, during the 2026 AAA Global Connect (formerly the Annual Meeting) in Las Vegas, NV. The Accounting Hall of Fame originated at The Ohio State University in 1950 and has inducted a total of one hundred and twenty-four members as of August 2025. In 2017, the AHOF transitioned its operations to the AAA.

The 2026 inductees represent a diverse group of accounting thought leaders from practice and academia. The AHOF Selection Committee invited nominations from numerous domestic and international accounting and professional organizations, academic institutions, Hall of Fame members, and individuals devoted to the furtherance of accounting, in its many fields. This year’s inductees are Eugene (Gene) Louis Dodaro, Daniel Lee Goelzer, Richard Victor Alvarus Mattessich (1922–2019), and William Ernest McCarthy.

Eugene (Gene) Louis Dodaro served as the eighth Comptroller General of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) from December 30, 2010 to December 29, 2025.

Dodaro testified before Congress more than 200 times on important national issues, including the nation's response to the coronavirus pandemic, the federal government’s long-term fiscal outlook, efforts to reduce and eliminate overlap and duplication across the federal government and GAO's "High Risk List" that focuses on specific challenges—from reducing improper payments under Medicare and Medicaid to improving the Pentagon's business practices including its financial management. In addition, Dodaro continued the development of GAO’s efforts to meet the needs of Congress in such areas as science, technology and cybersecurity.

As Comptroller General, Dodaro helped oversee the development and issuance of hundreds of reports and testimonies each year to committees and individual Members of Congress. GAO products led to hearings and legislation, billions of dollars in taxpayer savings, and improvements to a wide range of government programs and services.

In a GAO career lasting more than 52 years, Dodaro held a number of key executive posts. For nine years, Dodaro served as the Chief Operating Officer, the number two leadership position at the agency, helping provide direction and vision for GAO's diverse, multidisciplinary workforce in serving Congress and improving government.

In leading GAO, Dodaro worked with Congress and the administration on major management reforms, including the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014; the Fraud Reduction and Data Analytics Act of 2015; and the 1994 Government Management Reform Act, which expanded the Chief Financial Officers Act. He also has extensive experience working with state and local government officials.

Until 1999, Dodaro headed GAO's Accounting and Information Management Division, the agency's largest unit, which specialized in financial management, computer technology, and budget issues. While there, he directed the first-ever audit of the comprehensive financial statements covering all federal departments and agencies. He also has been instrumental in strengthening the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board. It has been recognized by the AICPA as producing Generally Accepted Accounting Principles for the federal government. In addition to continuing the annual audit of the U.S. government’s financial statements, Dodaro worked with the Office of Management and Budget, the Treasury Department, as well as CFOs and Inspectors General, to develop and maintain the annual production and audit of financial statements of individual departments and agencies across government.

Dodaro also oversaw the development of several updates to the Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards that must be used by all auditors auditing the use of federal funds. He also directed the creation of updated Internal Control Standards to be used by all executive branch managers.

Dodaro, who holds a bachelor's degree in accounting from Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a member of the Association of Government Accountants (AGA). Dodaro received recognition from numerous organizations. In 2025 he received AGA’s Lifetime Achievement Award for a Legacy of Service and was inducted into the Government Executive’s Government Hall of Fame. Prior awards include the Braden Award from the Department of Accountancy at Case Western Reserve University, the Administrator of the Year Award from the Romney Institute, Brigham Young University Marriott School of Business, the John Glenn Excellence in Public Service Award from The Ohio State University, and the Accounting Exemplar Award from the American Accounting Association’s Public Interest, Ethics and Sustainability Section.

Eugene (Gene) Louis Dodaro will be the 125th inductee to The Accounting Hall of Fame.

Daniel Lee Goelzer has had a distinguished career as a lawyer, CPA, and senior regulatory official. He was one of the architects of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s (PCAOB) structure and operations and has served for many years as a counselor and commentator on audit oversight and governance challenges.

Goelzer was raised in Wisconsin and earned a BBA in accounting and a JD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He began his professional career as an auditor at a predecessor to Deloitte & Touche. In 1974, he joined the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) staff and rose through the ranks to become the SEC’s General Counsel. In that role, he helped shape the Commission’s approach to corporate governance, internal accounting control, and audit committee responsibilities.

Following his SEC service, Goelzer advised financial institutions, public companies, and accounting firms on regulatory and governance matters as a partner at Baker McKenzie. In 2002, the SEC appointed him as a founding member of the PCAOB’s Board. He served on the PCAOB for over nine years and played a central role in establishing the Board and its efforts to enhance audit quality in the interest of investors and the public. He was the Board’s Acting Chair from 2009 to 2011.

After his PCAOB tenure, Goelzer returned to Baker McKenzie. He retired from the firm in 2018 but has remained active in public company financial disclosure and auditing. For eleven years, he chaired Deloitte & Touche’s Audit Quality Advisory Council and, in that capacity, provided advice and guidance on professional excellence in public company auditing and on challenges in the audit environment. Goelzer also served on the inaugural Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, helping to develop reporting standards to improve communication with investors regarding material climate and other sustainability information. He was a board member of the Capitol Area Chapter of the National Association of Corporate Directors from 2012 to 2017 and was active in the Chapter’s director education programming.

On the global stage, Melancon co-founded and chaired the Global Accounting Alliance (GAA), strengthening international collaboration among accounting bodies and was involved in the establishment of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). He was an advocate for the creation of the Chartered Global Management Accountant (CGMA) designation to enhance the recognition of management accounting worldwide. His leadership in sustainability and financial reporting led to his involvement in shaping global reporting standards, influencing regulatory policies across multiple countries.

Goelzer has written and spoken extensively on securities regulation, public company disclosure, and auditing issues. Since 2013, he has published a bi-monthly newsletter on audit committee oversight responsibilities. His professional accomplishments have been recognized by the William O. Douglas Award (2012) conferred annually by the Association of Securities and Exchange Commission Alumni for distinguished contributions to the development of the federal securities laws. He also received the University of Wisconsin School of Business’s Distinguished Accounting Alumnus Award (2005) and the Presidential Distinguished Rank Award (1989) for sustained extraordinary accomplishments in government service.

Daniel Lee Goelzer will be the 126th inductee to The Accounting Hall of Fame.

Richard Victor Alvarus Mattessich (1922–2019) was one of the most influential accounting theorists of the postwar era and a central figure in what has come to be known as the golden age of a priori accounting research. Born in Trieste, Italy, and raised in Vienna, Mattessich earned the degree of Doctor of Economic Sciences from the Vienna University of Economics and Business in 1945. After early academic appointments in Switzerland and Canada, he joined the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959, where he worked alongside scholars such as Maurice Moonitz and Robert Sprouse. In this intellectually fertile environment, Mattessich produced Accounting and Analytical Methods (1964), a landmark contribution that sought to develop a unified, formally grounded framework linking micro- and macro-accounting systems. The book remains a foundational work in accounting theory.

In 1967, Mattessich accepted a professorship at the University of British Columbia, where he later held the Arthur Andersen & Co. Alumni Professorship of Accounting and served until his retirement in 1988, continuing thereafter as Professor Emeritus. Over the course of his career, he held visiting appointments across Europe, Asia, and the Pacific and received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Graz, Montesquieu–Bordeaux IV, Málaga, and Madrid. His scholarly output was extraordinary in both scope and longevity: more than 25 books and over 180 journal articles and book chapters, with a substantial portion published after his formal retirement. His work ranged from accounting measurement and systems methodology to the philosophy of science and the historical origins of accounting practice, reflecting a sustained commitment to conceptual rigor and interdisciplinary inquiry.

At the core of Accounting and Analytical Methods was the claim that accounting systems could be analyzed, compared, and designed on the basis of explicit assumptions about measurement, valuation, and structure. Mattessich treated accounting as a quantitative representation of income and wealth phenomena, applicable across both firm-level and macroeconomic contexts. Central to this framework was an expanded conception of duality, understood not merely as a bookkeeping technique but as a general structural feature of economic processes. The book integrated insights from measurement theory, economics, management science, and systems analysis, and advanced the view that accounting’s intellectual progress depended on clarity about its logical foundations as much as on empirical refinement. Even where its formal ambitions exceeded what practice could immediately accommodate, the work established a vocabulary and analytical orientation that reshaped subsequent debates in accounting theory.

Mattessich’s contributions were recognized by numerous professional honors, including the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants–American Accounting Association Award for Notable Contribution to Accounting Literature, the Canadian Academic Accounting Association’s Haim Falk Award for Distinguished Contribution to Accounting Thought, and the Academy of Accounting Historians’ Hourglass Award. He served on The Accounting Hall of Fame’s Nominating Committee in two separate periods. Although the a priori tradition he helped shape later gave way to empirically oriented paradigms, its legacy endures in the intellectual foundations of the discipline. Through his insistence on analytical clarity, formal reasoning, and methodological self-reflection, Mattessich played a decisive role in establishing accounting as a rigorous academic field, and his legacy continues to inform scholarship across generations.

Richard Victor Alvarus Mattessich will be the 127th inductee to The Accounting Hall of Fame.

William Ernest McCarthy is the original designer of the REA (Resource-Event-Agent) accounting model – a semantic schema for portraying the elementary components of a business transaction (like an atomic swap of goods for money). The conceptual foundations for REA evolved from McCarthy’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Massachusetts, and its content was refined and edited through multiple rounds of review into two papers published in The Accounting Review (TAR), under the skillful guidance of Stephen Zeff while he was an Assistant Professor of Accounting at Michigan State University (MSU). The second (July 1982) of the TAR papers was The REA Accounting Model: A Generalized Framework for Accounting Systems in a Shared Data Environment – the seminal REA exposition and a paper whose subtitle indicated the revolutionary interoperability and ontological directions that McCarthy’s research would pursue for the remainder of his career.

The REA accounting model is both:
• A predictive model that argued that the file-based accounting systems of the 1970s and 1980s should be evolving with semantic technology toward enterprise-wide databases with more embedded meaning and better interoperability features, as occurred when enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs) arose in the marketplace in the late 1980s and 1990s.
• A normative model that provided a conceptual basis for moving away from classic accounting general ledger structures toward enterprise value-creation architectures. Several firms followed this path in the 2000s, with the best example being the Workday ERP.

During the later 1980s and 1990s, McCarthy refined and extended the scope of REA representation innovations with the assistance of his MSU doctoral students: Howard Armitage, Graham Gal, Paul Steinbart, Eric Denna, Steve Rockwell, Cheryl Dunn, Julie Smith David, Greg Gerard, and from Belgium, Guido Geerts. Geerts joined the MSU faculty in 1994, and together he and McCarthy extensively developed REA expansions in both the granularity plane (supply chains, value chains, and workflow) and the temporal plane (commitments, contracts, and policies). McCarthy was recruited into the interoperability and database standards communities in the early 2000s, where he worked extensively with ebXML, UN/CEFACT, and ISO. That work resulted in many reports, specifications, and standards, the latest of which are ISO/IEC 15944-4 (collaboration space interoperability) and ISO/IEC 15944-21 (distributed business transaction repositories). The standards involvement also led to extensive REA use in open value networks like Sensorica, Holochain, and ValueFlows (working with Lynn Foster and Bob Haugen).

In 2026, REA stands as an interoperable and ontological alternative to double-entry accounting as a method for reflecting the event-level economic realities and the entrepreneurial logic of both firms and networks. Debit-credit-account judgements are deferred to database views materialized far away from transaction capture points, and REA accommodates all traditional financial reporting needs as derived data in that manner. A comprehensive catalog of present and future REA development components was published as an AAA monograph (commissioned by Steven Kachelmeier) in 2022, entitled The REA Accounting Model as an Accounting and Economic Ontology.

McCarthy is also a master accounting teacher, winning instructional and curriculum awards at the departmental level (Salmonson Award) in 1985, 1993, 2003, 2011, and 2019, and at the college level (Withrow and Lewis Awards) in 1999 and 2024 (with Severin Grabski). At the national level, he was awarded the 2003 AAA Innovation in Accounting Education Award and the 2007 AAA Outstanding Service Award (for sharing his REA teaching materials). The high point of his teaching career was winning the American Accounting Association/J. Michael and Mary Anne Cook/Deloitte Foundation Prize in 2019. He has also been given the MSU Distinguished Faculty Award (2000) and the AAA Outstanding Accounting Educator Award (2008).

William Ernest McCarthy will be the 128th inductee to The Accounting Hall of Fame.

About the American Accounting Association
Promoting excellence in accounting education, research, and practice, the American Accounting Association (AAA) is the largest community of accountants in academia. Founded in 1916, we have a rich and reputable history built on leading-edge research and publications. The diversity of our membership creates a fertile environment for collaboration and innovation. Collectively, we shape the future of accounting through teaching, research, and a powerful network, ensuring our position as thought leaders in accounting. For more information about the AAA, please visit http://aaahq.org

The Accounting Hall of Fame was established at The Ohio State University in 1950.