Broad School's McCarthy receives teaching award from American Accounting Association

William E. McCarthy, professor in Accounting and Information Systems for the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University, has just been given the 2003 Innovation in Accounting Award by the American Accounting Association. McCarthy received the award for his seminal work in developing the REA Modeling (economic Resources, economic Events, and economic Agents) approach to teaching complex accounting information systems.

According to McCarthy, he first devised the REA model in 1982 as a framework for understanding accounting systems in a shared-data environment. The model's core feature is a pattern of two mirror-image data sets that represent the input and output components of a business process. As business processes and related technologies have evolved over the years, McCarthy has continued to extend the REA model to include abstract specification of future resource commitments along both supply and value chains.

The REA modeling approach is now used by more than 100 universities worldwide to help illustrate relational database systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and collaborative e-commerce systems. An article summarizing the Broad School's approach with the model is published in the November 2003 Issues in Accounting Education journal.

Click here for past home page stories