The Award Committee is pleased to announce that Professor Maurice Gosselin has been selected as the 2023 recipient of the George Baxter Award for Outstanding Contributions to the CAAA.

Professor Gosselin has made many notable contributions to the CAAA over several decades. Professor Gosselin has served as President of the CAAA (2012-2013); as a member of the L. S. Rosen Award selection committee (2005-2010); as a member of the Contemporary Accounting Research editor-in-chief selection committee (2018-2019); as an editorial board member of Contemporary Accounting Research (2000-2020); as a member of the CPA Canada-CAAA Research Grant Committee (2018-2019); and as a member of the Board of Directors on the CAAA (1999-2000; 2011-2014). The Award Committee noted that while these contributions are specific to the CAAA, Professor Gosselin has also made many other pedagogical contributions to the accounting profession through his sustained involvement with CPA Canada and the former CMA Canada and CGA Canada. For his lifetime of sustained service, the Award Committee determined that Professor Gosselin is a worthy recipient of the 2023 George Baxter Award.

In today’s volatile global business environment, the key challenge for accounting function is how to lead the enterprise in its growth strategies while ensuring effective risk management and stewardship of the enterprise. With complexity and data proliferation, increasingly the CEO and the Board turn to accountants to help make sense of data, to help cut through this complexity, and to provide more informed analysis on the business and its operation. The opportunity for accounting function is if it can generate the insights that help make better corporate decision making, while continuing to ensure effective control of the enterprise, its reputation as a catalyst for growth will be guaranteed. Hence, traditional accounting departments may have to transform themselves into ‘intelligent accounting functions’. Intelligent accounting functions run their operations as cost effectively as possible, leveraging technology to reduce finance operating costs; strengthen stewardship and control so as to establish a solid foundation to support growth.

The Best Accounting Perspectives Case Award Committee (Committee) selected Risks and Controls in a Changing Business Environment: Global Transportation Facility and Concerns About Missing Revenues as the recipient of the Best Accounting Perspectives Case Award (Award) for cases published in Accounting Perspectives from January 1 to December 31, 2022. The author, Ron Messer, will be recognized during the Canadian Academic Accounting Association Conference to be held in June 2023.

The Committee evaluated cases including Risks and Controls in a Changing Business Environment: Global Transportation Facility and Concerns About Missing Revenues against factors including, but not limited to:

• Clarity;
• Originality;
• Realism;
• Interest;
• Educational value;
• Currency of technical issues;
• Diversity of technical issues;
• Inclusion of enabling competencies;
• Requirement to prioritize issues, integrate, etc.; and
• Completeness.

Based on the evaluations performed by Committee members, Risks and Controls in a Changing Business Environment: Global Transportation Facility and Concerns About Missing Revenues was selected as the recipient of the Award for the following reasons:

• The case assigns students to the role of the newly appointed Director of Internal Audit rather than a more traditional external auditor role.
• Although fictionalized, the case is based on air transportation facilities around the world which makes it realistic.
• The case addresses a shortage of cases with data analytics requirements. It provides opportunities to learn how to use and interpret data.
• The case addresses multiple technical competency areas and issues applicable to accounting courses/programs and requires integration between the technical competency areas.
• The case requires students to perform quantitative and qualitative analyses of the issues.
• The case provides opportunities for students to develop enabling competencies.
• The case and teaching notes are well written and comprehensive.

The committee applauded the author(s) for addressing an important managerial issue using a cleverly and carefully designed experiment. The paper finds that an algorithm-generated bonus allocation scheme improves employee productivity, compared with human managers’ bonus allocation. It also find that compared with human managers’ bonus allocation, the algorithm-based one removes managers’ responsibility and improves employees’ trust in rewarding system. This research not only improves our understanding of how employees react to algorithm-based performance evaluations but also contributes to the research on subjective performance evaluation in important ways. The committee was also impressed with the rigor of the research and the writing quality.