William Rudolph Kinney, Jr.

An exemplary researcher and revered mentor to students and colleagues, he has led in the development of research on auditing and related accounting phenomena for almost fifty years. His research brought new vitality and scholarly interest to a key domain of the accounting profession.

He was born in Okmulgee Oklahoma in 1942, to William Rudolph and Beulah Mae Kinney, postal clerk and college professor, respectively, who stressed education and provided a rich cultural heritage that included tribal affairs of The Chickasaw Nation. Bill has continued these traditions.

After high school, he entered Oklahoma State University where he earned a baccalaureate degree in accounting, aided by Dean McGlamery and Wilton Anderson. Following graduation in 1963, he joined Arthur Young & Company in Oklahoma City and returned to Oklahoma State a year later to complete an M.S.in accounting. In 1965, he entered the Ph.D. program at Michigan State University, where he was influenced by Don Edwards, Gardner Jones, and Herb Miller.

Upon completing his Ph.D. in accounting in 1968, he returned to Oklahoma State as an assistant professor, then joined the faculty of the University of Iowa two years later. During the influential years in Iowa City, he was named the John F. Murray Professor of Accounting in 1977 and Director of the Institute of Accounting Research in 1981. In 1983, he was appointed Price Waterhouse Auditing Professor and Director of the Paton Accounting Center at the University of Michigan. In 1988, he joined The University of Texas at Austin faculty as Charles and Elizabeth Prothro Regents Chair in Business and PwC Fellow in Auditing, appointments he holds today. He co-founded and, from 1999 to 2003, was Director of the Center for Business Measurement and Assurance Services. In addition, he has held multiple visiting teaching and fellowship appointments at INSEAD, Northwestern University, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

He has authored or co-authored nine books and monographs and more than 100 articles in scholarly and professional journals, including more than 60 in refereed scholarly journals. His innovative textbook titled Information Quality Assurance and Internal Control for Management Decision Making, published in 2000, stresses the roles of independent assurance in capital markets, governance, and management. His research, most of which is in auditing, has used archival, analytic, and experimental methods and, for forty-five years, has appeared regularly in the Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, and the Journal of Accounting and Economics. In 1985, he and Bill Felix received the AICPA-AAA Notable Contribution to the Accounting Literature Award for “Research in the Auditor’s Opinion Formulation Process: State of the Art,” published in 1982 in The Accounting Review. He won the John S. Wildman Medal, awarded jointly by Deloitte and the American Accounting Association for research with practical implications for problems of the public accounting profession, in 1983,1999, and 2006. The most recent recognized “Auditor Independence, Non-Audit Services, and Restatements,” with Zoe-Vonna Palmrose and Susan Scholz, that was published in the 2004 Journal of Accounting Research and substantively influenced SEC policy on audit firm independence. In addition to auditing, his 1976 Journal of Financial Economics paper titled “Seasonality in Capital Markets: the Case of Common Stocks,” coauthored with Michael Rozeff, has become a classic in finance and has been widely quoted for almost forty years.

He is a distinguished teacher of auditing and accounting research subjects who has served on 40 doctoral dissertation committees, chairing 17 of them beginning with Dan Collins in 1973, and has mentored countless other doctoral students. His article “Empirical Accounting Research Design for Ph.D. Students” that appeared in The Accounting Review in 1988 and included the “Kinney three paragraphs” for communicating research has influenced multiple generations of graduate students at universities across the United States and abroad. Further, since 2000, his related lecture, “Planning for Research Success,” has been presented at five AAA Doctoral Consortiums, four AAA New Faculty Consortiums, three Ph.D. Project Conferences, and numerous other education programs.

He has an extensive record of service to both academic and professional practice organizations. He has made workshop presentations to virtually every major accounting faculty in the United States and to many around the world, serving as the American Accounting Association’s Distinguished International Lecturer in 1990. In addition, he served the AAA as Director of Research (1985-1987), as Managing Editor of The Accounting Review (1987-1990), and two terms as an associate editor. For twenty-five years, he served on the editorial board of the Journal of Accounting Research and also on boards of Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory (for which he was a charter board member), The Accounting Review, and Accounting Horizons.

As an auditing standards setter, he served a term on the AICPA’s Auditing Standards Board (1981-1984) and two-terms as a non-practicing member of the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (2007-2012). His AICPA activities include the Special Committee on Assurance Services (1994-1996) and task forces on Securities Laws and Regulations (1995-1997) and Contingencies and Uncertainties (1981-1983). From 1987-1991, he was a member of the FASB’s Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council and from 2003-2009 was a founding member of the Advisory Council of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. In addition, he has advised global network accounting firms, the SEC, NACD, and GAO.

His many honors include the AAA’s Outstanding Accounting Educator Award in 1989 and the Auditing Section’s Distinguished Service and Outstanding Educator Awards in 1993 and 1996, respectively. In 2002, he received the AICPA’s Distinguished Achievement in Accounting Education Award. He has also been recognized by Beta Alpha Psi awards from his alma maters and by Oklahoma State University’s College of Business Hall of Fame Award. He takes particular satisfaction in the Diversity Section’s Exemplary Mentorship to Diversity Faculty and Doctoral Students Award for 2004 and the ABO Section’s recognition for supervising a minority student who won the Outstanding Dissertation Award for 1995.

Bill and Carolyn, married for fifty-five years, reside in Austin, Texas. They have three children, Kristi, Jeff, and Rob, and six grandchildren Alex, Louis, Elea, Olivia, Max, and Nia. He is the 92nd member of The Accounting Hall of Fame, William Rudolph Kinney, Jr.