News

Wenqian Hu’s paper Trust Versus Rewards: Revisiting Managerial Discretion in Incomplete Contracts was awarded the Lazaridis Institute Prize for the best paper on accounting issues relevant to technology firms. The paper finds that an algorithm-generated bonus allocation scheme improves employee productivity, compared with human managers’ bonus allocation.

In fast-paced and often rapidly changing work environments, employers continue to seek new and improved ways to recognize employees in the workplace. However, new research from the University of Waterloo suggests that public peer recognition may backfire by enabling comparisons among employees, and these comparisons may make some employees feel unfairly treated.

From becoming the first member of her family to graduate from university, Ranjini Jha now educates other students as a professor of finance at the University of Waterloo.

Currently, Ho works as an associate in private equity at Brookfield Asset Management and he attributes the start of building his investor mindset to his experience at the University of Waterloo with the Student Investment Fund (SIF). SIF gave him and other SAF students the unique opportunity to invest with real money and get hands-on-training in equity valuation and portfolio management with guidance from industry experts and faculty mentors. This taught him about value investing that he then applied to his co-op role as private equity analystat the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and when competing in the CFA Institute Research Challenge.

Mingyue Zhang is an assistant professor of accounting at the School of Accounting and Finance at the University of Waterloo.

She earned her PhD in Accounting from the University of Toronto (Rotman School of Management) and Master of Professional Accounting from Singapore Management University. She is also an affiliate of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants.(ACCA)

by Alyana Versolatto

The School of Accounting and Finance (SAF) is pleased to share that professor Efrim Boritz was inducted this year into the Canadian Accounting Hall of Fame for his extraordinary contributions to the accounting profession. During Boritz’s illustrious 40-year career at the University of Waterloo, he has been a prolific writer and researcher with 24 books and monographs to his credit and over 40 articles in refereed journals. His research involves investigating areas of professional practice in external auditing and internal auditing which rely on the exercise of professional judgment.

Cyber-attacks and data breaches are of great concern for data-sensitive organizations. These organizations are adept at safeguarding data but fail in safeguarding against cyber-attacks. Phishing is a semantic attack that deceives email users into clicking on the embedded link or attachment in an email. The goal could be to induce the email users to subsequently give away sensitive information, enable malware that can steal passwords, or install a backdoor into the user’s system and encrypt the users’ data. Phishing imposes a great risk on these organizations for two reasons. First, even a non-vital position in which employees likely perceive little cyber risk, if being attacked, could cause significant economic loss and litigations. Second, phishing emails could simultaneously reach most employees within an organization. Thus, strengthening the frontier of safeguarding against phishing is of vital importance.

On a bright sunny day at the TD Centre in Toronto, professor Adam Vitalis interviewed four SAF alums about their careers in the internal audit field. Internal audit is a critical component of effective corporate governance and risk management and plays an important role in helping organizations achieve their objectives while safeguarding their assets and reputation.

As workplace practices continue to shift, organizations are finding inventive ways to keep their employees motivated and committed to reaching their goals.

The University of Waterloo community came together to cheer on eight finalist teams as they pitched to a panel of judges and a chock-full room of attendees at the Velocity $5K finals on March 30th in the Black and Gold Room at the University’s Student Life Centre.