Access to Audit Personnel
Access to Audit Personnel supports scholars with access to practicing auditors for experimental, behavioral, and qualitative research that contributes to auditing scholarship and practice.
Funder: American Accounting Association
Due Dates: December 3, 2026 (Submissions open) | February 3, 2027, 11:59 pm ET (Proposal deadline)
Funding Amounts: Access to auditor research participants
Summary: Supports scholars conducting experimental, behavioral, and qualitative auditing research by connecting them with practicing auditors.
Key Information: Applications require well-developed hypotheses and data collection protocols, with a five-page proposal limit.
Description
The American Accounting Association’s Access to Audit Personnel program helps scholars obtain auditor participants for research relevant to public company auditing. Through a competitive annual proposal process, the program addresses the difficulty of recruiting practitioners from multiple audit firms. Eight large U.S. public accounting firms provide access to participants, and the AAA Auditing Section selects the academic members of the review committee.
The program supports experimental, behavioral, and qualitative research; its proposal-development webinar also identifies survey research as a supported method. Successful proposals combine strong theoretical grounding, sound study design, and clear potential contributions to academic literature and auditing practice. Past projects have examined professional skepticism, evidence collection and evaluation, complex estimates, and prior-year workpapers.
