The award was presented at the Management Accounting Section Midyear Meeting held in January in Austin, Texas.

They received the award for their paper The Relation between Internal Forecasting Sophistication and Accounting Misreporting. JMAR is the journal of the American Accounting Association’s Management Accounting Section. This paper was also part of Mario Schabus’ PhD thesis. Schabus received his doctorate from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) in 2017 and now works as a senior lecturer at Monash University. Until recently, Frank Verbeeten was also a professor of Accounting at the UvA.

Internal forecasting

The paper looks at internal forecasting sophistication (IFS), the quality of accumulating, processing, and integrating information from various sources into projections of future outcomes. The research highlights the potential of IFS to reduce costly end-of-year accounting misreporting. This is because firms with better IFS are better able to make accurate projections and develop contingency plans if underlying assumptions are not met. This enables these firms to respond swiftly to changes in environmental conditions, ultimately reducing the demand for misreporting. By focusing on decision-making role of accounting information, instead of the widely studied incentive and control role, this study contributes to the accounting literature. The paper provides actionable insights for firms by showing how internal forecasting is interrelated to financial reporting choices.