In my studies at EMU, I completed numerous group and individual research projects involving the accounting process. Here is a brief explanation of those projects:
- Accounting Information Systems: Systems Understanding Aid project – An individual project that involved practicing the accounting process from original paper documents to preparing financial statements for a hypothetical company.
- Government and Not-for-Profit Accounting: Group project analyzing Nashville’s revenues, expenditures, and debt obligations to determine how well the city meets its service obligations. The study was based on the city's CAFRs, Comprehensive Annual Financial Report.
- Professional Auditing: Semester-long group project analyzing a publicly traded company's 10-Ks, 10-Qs, and proxy filings. The objective of the report was to provide an audit plan for the company.
- Tax Research Methods, Practice and Problems: The class focused on researching tax law to solve hypothetical problems such as determining the proper tax treatment for capital gains or losses for property valuation following catastrophic loss. We were also required to do an individual research project on a tax code section highlighting how the code section came about, court rulings, and special rules. I chose Section 1031, Exchange of property held for productive use or investment.
- Accounting 696 – Cap stone class of the master’s program: The course emphasized using publicly-traded corporations' filings with the SEC and financial news sources for both the class assignments and the semester long team project. Assignments involved in-depth analysis of a hypothetical company’s financial information and creation of journal entries, operational analysis, and assessment of market performance, along with financial statement preparation. The team project was a semester long endeavor based on hypothetical stock trades for four publicly traded corporations, with a final report on the stock performance of the companies using various analysis techniques, such as financial ratios, and using information obtained from the companies’ financial statements.
Other coursework included Accounting Principals, Intermediate Accounting, Corporate Financial Reporting, Advanced Financial Reporting, Federal Income Taxation, Investment and Tax Financial Planning, Federal Taxation of Corporations and Partnerships, Managerial Cost Accounting, Business Law, and Economics.