Master of Science in Business: Accounting

Course Descriptions

(BUAC 798A) Action Learning Project (2 credits)
This is a significant consulting project within teams, designed by individual MS student participants and faculty. It may also be an individual project/study or a business simulation exercise.

(BUAC 711) Advanced Managerial Accounting and Control Systems (3 credits)
This course focuses on topics that emphasize the role of managerial accounting in a firm's overall management planning and control structure. A key concern is to show how effective organizations ensure that the parts of the organization work together to create the whole, and how the sum of the parts, through synergy, can indeed be greater than the whole. The COSO Enterprise Risk Management Framework is reviewed to provide a better understanding of the difference between risk assessment at the macro- and micro-levels. This course has three specific objectives:

  1. To ensure students' understanding of how planning and control systems can assist management in the attainment of the organization's strategic, as well as non-strategic, objectives;
  2. To acquaint the student with the types of cost management systems typically required by management, and how the information is normally accumulated, reported and utilized; and
  3. To explore the design of planning and control systems to facilitate effective decision-making. Through lectures, class discussions, and case studies, the course examines such topics as target costing, open-book management, value chain analysis, activity-based costing, balanced-scorecard, accounting versus economic rate of return, and residual income (and its variant called economic value added). In addition, a review of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, such as those by Oracle and SAP, is considered to ascertain how they address managerial accounting issues within organizations.

(BUAC 798B) Business Communications (2 credits)
This course focuses on the art of communication and its effects on people, organizations, and other stakeholders. The course will focus on two aspects of business communications: persuasive communications and effective presentations. The objective for the persuasive communications sessions is to have students improve upon their day-to-day oral business communications skills. This will be accomplished as participants learn to tailor each communication to the person or people with whom they are speaking.

(BUAC 798H) Negotiations (2 Credits)

This highly experiential course will improve students' negotiation skills and capacity to acquire and effectively use power. By using a variety of assessment tools, feedback sources, skill-building exercises, and exercise debriefings, the class will increase students' negotiating self-confidence and improve their capacity to achieve win-win solutions to individual, team, and organizational problems. The course is designed to enhance students' negotiating self confidence and improve students' analytical skills, interpersonal skills, creativity (e.g., identifying creative solutions to conflict), and persuasive abilities.

(BUAC 798C) Business Ethics for Accountants and Auditors (3 credits)
This course considers all segments of accounting and discusses selected business ethics issues. The class is conducted in a seminar format. Teaching techniques may include, but are not limited to, outside speakers, team presentations, cases, and role-plays. Ethical theory, corporate social responsibility, and individual decision-making are considered. Some of the applied topics that may be covered in this course include, but are not limited to, independence of internal auditors, intellectual property issues, corporate downsizing, global ethics, crises management, and employment ethics. Each student completes a social audit of a company.

(BUAC 758J) Financial Statement Analysis (3 credits)
This course provides a framework for using a firm's financial statements to perform a comprehensive analysis of the firm's operating performance, cash management, and financial position as well as to value the firm and to detect earnings management. It includes an overview of the accounting and auditing standard setting framework, and the relevance of U.S. GAAP as well as International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) to accounting recognition, measurement, presentation, and disclosure. It also identifies the analytical relevance of a selected set of more advanced accounting topics (e.g., valuing employee stock options). An effort is made to show that the fields of accounting and finance are coalescing, and are therefore, interdependent. Actual financial statements are used to demonstrate the practical relevance of these ideas in a sophisticated and complex world of global accounting. The primary areas of interdependence covered include measures of market risk for firm valuation and capital budgeting decisions and the use of derivative financial instruments for risk management, and the accounting treatment of those instruments, to include the option pricing models used to value employee stock options.

(BUAC 798D) Forensic Accounting/Auditing (3 credits)
This course familiarizes students in forensic accounting/auditing issues. The course presents traditional areas of fraud: fraudulent financial reporting, and misappropriation of assets. Using a case study format and by studying and reviewing some recent and historical cases of fraud at large companies, relevant issues for all concerned stakeholders (capital market participants) are identified. Additionally, the course prepares students to understand other areas of fraud and corruption, including cybercrime, money laundering, FCPA violations, securities fraud, and identity theft. Although the emphasis of the course is on prevention, deterrence, detection, and control, it does provide an overview of the investigation and prosecution of fraud as well.

(BUAC 798E) Information Security, Audit and Control (3 credits)
This course builds on basic information technology (IT) courses, focusing on key issues including IT security, IT controls, and IT auditing. It addresses such issues as auditing a computer information system; assessing risks; identifying control objectives; identifying appropriate audit procedures; choosing audit software; conducting an operational audit of a computer information system; and developing world-class IT control frameworks. The course provides an understanding of IT implications of COSO's Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) Framework and COBIT from the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA). The content of this course is based on the seven domains covered in the Certified Information Systems Audit (CISA) Examination. Students complete a course project using audit software such as ACL or IDEA.

(BMGT 657) Leadership and Human Capital (3 Credits)
This course develops competencies critical for executive success including communication skills (verbal, written, listening), interpersonal sensitivity, teamwork, analytical thinking, decision-making skills, and planning and organizing. Topics for discussion include: leadership, power and influence, empowerment, strategic vision, conflict, staffing, legal issues and requirements with human capital, training, mentoring, career development, succession planning, motivation, performance management, goal setting, feedback, coaching, rewards and incentives, discipline, designing and building effective teams, and change management. Occasionally, outside speakers make presentations based on their credentials and experience. In addition, the course contains an examination of research and theory concerning the forces which contribute to the behavior of organizational members. The relevance of the behavioral sciences to the context of contemporary organizations, such as culture, ethics, and tone at the top, is emphasized. Topics covered include work group behavior, supervisory behavior, inter group relations, employee goals and attitudes, communication problems, organizational change, and organizational goals and design. The importance of developing managerial skills such as persuasion, negotiation, conflict management, and change management in addition to possessing technical proficiency is highlighted.

Required Courses for Internal Audit Track

(BUAC 798F) Internal Auditing I: Conceptual and Institutional Framework (3 credits)
This initial internal audit course provides students with an overview and understanding of the broad context within which internal auditing processes and functions. This course also will cover internal audit's critical role in Sarbanes-Oxley, Section 404 compliance efforts. Internal auditing is presented as an integral part of effective corporate governance. Critical knowledge areas include the profession's conceptual framework (IIA Professional Practices Framework), role and responsibilities of management, corporate governance, external audit, and the audit committee (i.e., the four pillars of corporate governance as described by the IIA). Examples of assurance and consulting activities undertaken by the internal audit function, as well as the sourcing strategy (viz., full insourcing, co-sourcing or full outsourcing models) are discussed. Students are introduced to internal control theory, test design concepts including audit sampling, and best practices.

(BUAC 798G) Internal Auditing II: Internal Audit Application and Practice (3 credits)
The second-level internal auditing course provides students with a more in-depth knowledge of the internal audit process and gives them hands-on experience in planning and conducting internal audit assurance and consulting engagements. Students build on the theory and techniques introduced in Internal Auditing I, through practical, in-depth training in specific audit areas. They will recognize the practical relevance of the IIA Professional Practices Framework to actual situations. In addition students obtain a direct working knowledge of audit sampling and software using ACL and/or IDEA. Internal auditing case studies are used to reinforce the learning process.

Elective Courses for the General Track

Selected elective business courses are subject to course availability and approval by the program Academic Director. General track students may also take the Internal Audit Course I to satisfy this track and select one business elective course.