Marshall Geiger

Professor

Marshall A. Geiger, Ph.D., CPA, is the CSX Chair in Management and Accounting and Professor of Accounting at the Robins School of Business, University of Richmond. Marshall has also been an honorary Professor of the Faculty of Business and Law at Deakin University in Australia. He graduated from Penn State University in 1988 with his Ph.D. in accounting and has published over 75 articles, a research monograph, and a Chapter in a research reference book on numerous topics in accounting, auditing and accounting education. Marshall has been recognized as the most prolific accounting scholar among all accounting Ph.Ds graduating worldwide in 1988. He is a past Editor at Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory, and former Associate Editor at Accounting Horizons and holds appointments on five editorial review boards of scholarly journals in the US and internationally. Marshall has delivered over 60 educational and research seminars and programs on a broad range of topics in accounting and auditing to a wide range of participants, including audit practitioners, entrepreneurs, academics, lawyers and standard-setters.

COVID-19 and the Going Concern Opinion
In the FARview Podcast Series, FAR staff members conduct interviews with academics and professionals regarding the practical relevance of academic research in the field of auditing. This written report contains an edited transcript of the interview with Marshall Geiger. Geiger is the CSX Chair in Management and Accounting and Professor of Accounting at the University of Richmond, US. Key points
  • A Going Concern Opinion is not supposed to predict failure, it’s a mechanism for the auditor to alert readers that there are concerns.
  • Going concern research in a COVID-19 era might flesh out more cleanly that more industry experience will lead to more accurate going concern opinions.
  • Companies are adapting their business models, but the real issue is how well they are going to do under the new business model, how excellent are they going to be able to execute their business plans.
  • The possibility of a second COVID_19 wave is an important issue. What will that wave look like? How much will it affect specific companies? And how much support will companies get then? That should also be disclosed by management.
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Auditor Reporting for Going-Concern Uncertainty – Research Findings and implications for practitioner
The auditor’s decision regarding a going concern opinion (GCO) is among their most important judgments, as GCOs impact the client company, markets, financial statement users, and auditors themselves. Such a sensitive and complex judgement call requires expertise and experience. In the academic literature, GCO decisions are often seen as related to audit quality, and they are among the few observable outcomes of the audit that vary across engagements. In the last decades, academic researchers have spent considerable effort examining GCO decisions. We believe that audit practitioners can benefit from improved awareness of the insights that research has generated. In our complete report (Geiger, Gold, and Wallage, 2019), we review and synthesize 149 academic studies authored since 2013, the end of the previous synthesis by Carson et al (2013). In this practitioner note, we make a selection of what we deem the most interesting insights from our review, and discuss their implications for practice. We then report on our focus group engagement with audit practitioners where we obtained their perceptions regarding some the academic findings, the issues faced in making GCO decisions, as well as areas where additional research would be helpful.
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A Synthesis of Research on Auditor Reporting on Going-Concern Uncertainty: An Update and Extension
Reporting on going-concern-related uncertainties remains one of the most challenging issues faced by external auditors. Even though professional standards do not hold external auditors responsible for predicting future events, such as the subsequent viability of audit clients, if an auditor refrains from issuing a going concern modified audit opinion (hereafter GCO) and the client company subsequently fails (referred to in the academic literature as a “type II” reporting error), the costs to the auditor in terms of increased litigation costs and loss of reputation are often substantial (Carcello and Palmrose 1994). At the same time, companies usually do not welcome a GCO from their auditor. For example, if an auditor renders a GCO to a financially distressed client, there is often concern that the GCO itself may precipitate, or at least accelerate, the financial distress of the already troubled company resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Further, if an auditor renders a GCO to a client that subsequently survives (referred to in the academic literature as a “type I” reporting error), these clients are significantly more likely to switch to another auditor for their next audit (Geiger, Raghunandan and Rama 1998). It is not surprising, then, that audit practitioners, regulators and standard-setters around the world continue to grapple with this complex issue. As requested by the Foundation for Audit Research (FAR), the primary purpose of this research synthesis is to review and discuss the recent academic literature pertinent to the auditor’s decision to issue, or not issue, a GCO. Our review begins with research available after the going-concern research synthesis provided in Carson, Fargher, Geiger, Lennox, Raghunandan and Willekens (2013). We attempt to minimize the gap and the overlap in the research discussed in Carson et al. (2013) and our work. Further, in an attempt to be as comprehensive as possible, we do not limit our coverage to only published research, but also include well-developed working papers in the public domain, particularly if we determine they add significant contribution to the literature.
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FAR Masterclass Report on Going Concern Opinions (GCO’s) in Theory and Practice
Marshall Geiger, Anna Gold and Philip Wallage presented a masterclass on Going Concern Opinions (GCOs). In this report, a summary of the masterclass is presented. The main purpose of the session was to communicate the main results of their literature synthesis and to extend and corroborate the findings of the focus group meeting that was part of the research project, by means of an in-depth discussion concerning eight broad GCO topics.  
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Practitioner Perspectives on Going Concern Opinion Research and Suggestions for Further Study
A two-part article published in Accounting Horizons Part 1 – Outcomes and Consequences Abstract: Auditing researchers rarely engage practicing auditors regarding the phenomena examined, or conclusions reached, in academic research. In an attempt to bridge this gap, we report on the outcomes, insights, and observations from focused interactions with Dutch audit practitioners regarding their perspectives on recent research regarding auditor going-concern opinion (GCO) decisions. We provided practitioners with a summary of some of the most salient recent GCO research findings and the goals of our subsequent discussions were to (1) obtain practitioners’ responses to the research findings, and (2)  identify relevant issues for future study from the perspective of practitioners. Accordingly, we report on our discussions with practitioners and provide a summary of practitioner-informed GCO-related future research topics. In this first of a two-part sequence, we provide background information relating to our practitioner interactions, and summarize our discussions pertaining to GCO outcomes and GCO consequences, as well as future research. Part 2 – Reporting Environment and the Decision-Making Process Abstract: Auditing researchers rarely engage practicing auditors regarding the phenomena examined, or conclusions reached, in academic research. In an attempt to bridge this gap, we report on the outcomes,  insights, and observations from focused interactions with Dutch audit practitioners regarding their perspectives on recent research regarding auditor going concern opinion (GCO) decisions. We provided  practitioners with a summary of some of the most salient recent GCO research findings. The goals of our  subsequent discussions were to (1) obtain practitioners’ responses to the research findings, and (2) identify relevant issues for future study from the perspective of practitioners. Accordingly, in this second of a two-part sequence of articles, we discuss the outcomes of our interactions with practitioners related to the GCO reporting environment and the GCO decision-making process, as well as directions for future research.
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Practitioner Perspectives on Going Concern Opinion Research and Suggestions for Further Study: Part 2—Reporting Environment and the Decision-Making Process
Auditing researchers rarely engage practicing auditors regarding the phenomena examined, or conclusions reached, in academic research. In an attempt to bridge this gap, we report on the outcomes, insights, and observations from focused interactions with Dutch audit practitioners regarding their perspectives on recent research regarding auditor going concern opinion (GCO) decisions. We provided practitioners with a summary of some of the most salient recent GCO research findings. The goals of our subsequent discussions were to (1) obtain practitioners’ responses to the research findings, and (2) identify relevant issues for future study from the perspective of practitioners. Accordingly, in this second of a two-part sequence of articles, we discuss the outcomes of our interactions with practitioners related to the GCO reporting environment and the GCO decision-making process, as well as directions for future research.  
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Practitioner Perspectives on Going Concern Opinion Research and Suggestions for Further Study: Part 1—Outcomes and Consequences
Auditing researchers rarely engage practicing auditors regarding the phenomena examined, or conclusions reached, in academic research. In an attempt to bridge this gap, we report on the outcomes, insights, and observations from focused interactions with Dutch audit practitioners regarding their perspectives on recent research regarding auditor going concern opinion (GCO) decisions. We provided practitioners with a summary of some of the most salient recent GCO research findings and the goals of our subsequent discussions were to (1) obtain practitioners’ responses to the research findings, and (2) identify relevant issues for future study from the perspective of practitioners. Accordingly, we report on our discussions with practitioners and provide a summary of practitioner-informed GCO-related future research topics. In this first of a two-part sequence, we provide background information relating to our practitioner interactions, and summarize our discussions pertaining to GCO outcomes and GCO consequences, as well as future research.  
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Auditors’ Going Concern Decisions: Insights from Practice
This paper draws on interviews with audit professionals in the Netherlands to investigate the decision-making processes involved in assessing and reporting on audit clients’ ability to continue as a going concern. Using Actor-Network-Theory, we conceptualize these decisions as a dynamic process, involving four interrelated stages. First, partners must recognize going concern as a critical issue of the audit (problematization). Second, they enlist a variety of internal and external actors to inform the assessment (interessement). Third, these actors are coordinated and monitored in the audit team’s preliminary evaluation (enrollment). Fourth, in consultation with national office, partners complete the going concern evaluation, including audit opinion wording and approval of financial statement disclosures (mobilization). By offering an in-depth process account of auditors’ going concern decisions, our study challenges prevailing portrayals in the literature as primarily individual or mechanistic. It also offers new insights and suggestions for future research into auditor going concern decisions.
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5th FAR International Conference booklet
The fifth annual FAR Conference was held on Monday June 22, 2020. As a result of the circumstances, the event took place in an online, Covid-19-proof setting. Still, almost 200 participants from all over the world registered for this virtual meeting. About 50 percent of these were academics. The other 50 percent consisted of students, practitioners, regulators and government officials. This strengthens our belief that a broad group of stakeholders appreciates the work of our Foundation. The theme of the conference was intentionally broad: ‘academic and practitioner insights into audit quality’. This theme seamlessly fits with FAR’s main purpose, which is facilitating knowledge development and knowledge dissemination concerning audit quality. In this booklet, we proudly present the summaries of the five conference presentations. At the end of each article, a selection is included of three Q&A’s from the Q&A sessions that took place after each presentation. We hope you will enjoy reading the summaries and viewing the presentations and Q&As, and we are looking forward to meeting you again, hopefully ‘in the flesh’, next late Spring 2021.  
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Auditors’ Going Concern Decisions: Insights from Practice
This practice note provides initial insights from an interview study that investigates audit professionals’ decision-making processes regarding their clients’ ability to continue as a going concern. The authors find that these decisions involve the activation of a range of different actors that the engagement leader needs to manage and coordinate. Specifically, auditors need to recognize going  concern as a relevant issue (Phase 1). They then need to negotiate the involvement of their firm’s national office and restructuring specialists (Phase 2). As they conduct the going concern assessment, they mobilize a range of internal and external actors to negotiate management disclosures and the inclusion (or not) of a going concern paragraph in their audit opinion (Phase 3).
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4th FAR International Conference booklet
The fourth annual conference of the Foundation for Auditing Research (FAR) was held in June 2019. The theme of the conference was ‘Evidence-informed policy making for the future of the auditing profession’. Therefore, the central question during all the presentations of this conference was: how can evidence-based auditing sector policy making be implemented? We are happy to offer you this conference report, which summarizes the keynote speeches and the FAR project presentations of preliminary research findings.  
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