Audrey A. Gramling new chair of Colorado State University accounting department

Note to Reporters: A photo of Audrey Gramling is available with this release at news.colostate.edu

Audrey A. Gramling, Ph.D., CPA, CIA, has joined the Colorado State University College of Business as chair of the Department of Accounting. She took over the position on July 1.

Gramling comes to CSU from Bellarmine University in Louisville, Ky., where she also chaired the accounting department and held the Treece Endowed Chair. She has been on the accounting faculty at Kennesaw State University, Georgia State University, Wake Forest University, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“I am happy to be part of Colorado State’s very strong accounting program,” she said. “We have great support from the firms who employ our students and a strong faculty that can bring their research into the classroom to keep the curriculum content relevant.”

Her goals as department chair are to assure students, both accounting majors and non-business majors alike, a rigorous academic experience.

“Accounting is so fundamental to any business setting that exposure to the subject can benefit everyone, from someone studying fashion merchandising to music majors who will need to manage their careers,” Gramling said.

She also looks forward to the department providing career development opportunities for accounting majors, and reaching out to alumni across the country who can share their experience in the workplace with current students.

Prior to earning her Ph.D. at the University of Arizona, Gramling worked as an external auditor at a predecessor firm of Deloitte and as an internal auditor at Georgia Institute of Technology. She has also served a one year appointment as an Academic Accounting Fellow in the Office of the Chief Accountant at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. She is the past-President of the Auditing Section of the American Accounting Association and has served in an advisory role to the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations (COSO).

Gramling’s research investigates both internal and external auditing issues, with a focus on decision behavior of auditors, external auditor independence, internal control reporting, and other factors affecting the market for audit and assurance services.

As a professor at CSU, she will be teaching auditing classes, and she feels strongly about the importance of ethical behavior in a field that has been battered during recent economic times.

“I tell my students that as auditors, they will have many opportunities to decide how to audit and what to audit in a given business,” Gramling explained. “When they make those decisions, they have to keep in mind that they are working for the public, for the investors in that company. Those investors, who could include retirees like their grandparents, have a right to expect a full and fair audit. In that sense, they are working for the public good.”

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