Paper presented to the American Accounting Association

15 May 2018

It was a wonderful experience to be invited to the prestigious meeting held by American Accounting Association. The meeting was attended by masters students, PhD students, researchers, lecturers, professors (especially Professor Wayne Thomas, the leading author of the Intermediate Accounting textbook) and practitioners from different institutions.

I was able to present my paper about 'New Accounting Regime to Serve National Interest', 'The Information Content of New Employee Benefit Accounting Standard' and 'Big Data Implication to Materiality in Accounting and Auditing'. I received support for those topics as well as constructive feedback to enhance my later research output. In addition, some Professors also gave me information and potential access for conducting a survey in the US for qualified respondents such as partners. In addition, I also got insight into using Amazon MTurk for experimental research.

I also had the chance to learn from Professors and Ph.D students who presented the different ranges of research papers topic such as Big Data, Taxation, Data Analytics, Strategic Accounting, Accounting Technology, Auditing and so on. The questions and answers during the presentation gave me better insight on conducting different types of research such as the challenges and solution tools.

Professor Guido L. Geerts presented 'Embedding Big Data and Analytics in Accounting' using Power BI and Hadoop. His presentation benefitted me for my upcoming dissertation on the topic of 'Big Data and Analytics Implication to Accounting Materiality' that is supervised by Dr Sebastian Hoffmann. This topic is really new and not many academics have conducted research on the implication of Big Data on accounting materiality standards.

Prof Geerts suggested the discussion of the materiality concern be addressed to Prof Miklos A Varsahelyi. In addition, there was a second chance to hear valuable Big Data research presentation conducted by Professor Monica Mendoza about 'Using IRS Big Data as a Budgeting Tool for Managers'. I was able to discuss the concept of materiality influenced by the availability of Big Data with Prof Mendoza.

Furthermore, this meeting also held a Big Data Accounting IS workshop utilising Tableau taught by expert practitioner Brian Russell from Tableau Corp. He taught us to use the application using several sources of data. I was able to get hands-on with the Tableau application installed on my personal laptop, with the software download link provided by him. I realised that Tableau is really impressive software to visualise and to analyse big data. The application can generate maps, sales concentration with different figures.

This software can even be linked directly to database located in SAP, Oracle, Cloud and so on. Using Tableau, the analytics of Big Data become possible, preferable, and disclosable. It is so easy to detect the anomalies in the data with different sets of time ranges, locations, and factors. Experiencing these technical skills of using Tableau for Big Data Analytics, it is now becoming clearer to think about the implications to accounting. Using Tableau Data Analytics, Accountant can analyse and disclose more relevant and faithful representative information.

In addition, Auditor can conduct population testing instead of sample-based testing to detect high risk transactions. In conclusion, I was very happy to learn from so many Professors, Researchers and Expert Practitioners. It enhanced my entrepreneurial skills both in research and in practice. The skills and knowledge obtained from this meeting will be useful to prepare the world of Accounting for Big Data and High Technology Analytics. Thanks to University of Edinburgh Business School, Santander, and the Indonesian Government Endowment Fund for Education.

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Irka Darojat, MSc Accounting and Finance. Find more information about Santander funding under Opportunities.