Barriers to Transferring Accounting and Auditing Research to Standard Setters

Auditing (accounting) researchers have published over 24,000 (75,000) academic articles (Google Scholar September 2016) using a variety of research methods since 1970. Yet accounting and auditing standard setters and regulators have frequently cited their inability to engage with and utilize this research to make evidence-informed standard setting and regulatory decisions. For society to benefit from the large research investment in accounting and auditing, the knowledge gained from that research needs to be transferred to such accounting and auditing policymakers. We draw conceptually on the knowledge creation and knowledge transfer literature to understand the barriers to utilizing academic research knowledge in applied settings. Based on this conceptual material, we then examine what the evidence-based policy and management movement holds up as the paradigmatic example of such knowledge transfer – evidence-based medicine (EBM). In particular, we focus on EBM knowledge translation approaches related to the development of evidence-based guidelines, treatment protocols and best practices. Researchers in medicine, management and policy have studied these approaches extensively and these approaches are current best practice examples of how to meet the knowledge transfer challenge that will allow the deployment of research by those who have need of it. Through this analysis of knowledge transfer theory and practice in other settings, we seek to understand and propose a tentative strategy to address the barriers between accounting and auditing research knowledge and policymaking. We provide a concrete example, based on our research in progress, of how to apply this approach to knowledge transfer in the context of a specific standard setting project – group audits