One of a handful of minorities in his  of working professionals at the University of Notre Dame’s , he remembers thinking, “This is an amazing space. Notre Dame is special; it just is. Why don’t we have more diversity?”

In August, he returned to Mendoza with 21 women and men from underrepresented groups for a three-day immersion in accounting and finance principles with finance teaching professor . The course is part of the new (DIL) program at Marian University in Indianapolis, which Jackson launched during his time as executive director of strategic initiatives.

Jackson, who was appointed chancellor of Marian University’s Saint Joseph’s College in September, envisions DIL as a vehicle for transforming state into “a place where human flourishing is a realistic endeavor for all.”

The six-month program — a collaboration among Marian, Notre Dame and several other Indiana universities — is designed to help close gaps in educational attainment, wealth, skills and career opportunities for minoritized groups and to provide a path to executive leadership and entrepreneurship. Other partners include business schools at Butler University, Indiana University’s IUPUI campus and Purdue University.

Questions about how to move more people from underrepresented groups into leadership and executive ranks have been on Jackson’s mind since graduate school. Jackson, who has a doctorate in workforce development and organizational leadership from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, believes higher education is one of the gatekeepers to those opportunities. “Typically, if you don’t have those credentials, you’re not going to be in those positions,” he says.

While a student at Notre Dame, he connected with Clements, who became one of several people at Notre Dame who served as both a sounding board and resource as Jackson began developing the program.

“This program looks to wrap the context of learning around real growth experiences, opportunities that are often not afforded minoritized groups, and remove barriers into degree programs that lead to the C-suite,” said Jackson. “DIL will transform passionate, talented and underutilized women and ethnic minorities into agents of impact, ready to help central Indiana realize its full potential as a major economic engine in the region, but it will take a concerted effort by all to facilitate access.”

Each partner institution hosts the program’s cohorts of up to 25 on their respective campuses once per month, led by faculty and staff from these institutions. Eligible participants must identify as a member of a minority group or a woman. Special consideration is given for women who have left the workplace for more than two years. All applicants must have earned a bachelor’s degree and have seven-plus years of work experience and at least two years of supervisory experience. The program had 48 applications for the first cohort and, by mid-September, already had more than 300 applicants for the spring 2022 cohort.

“Advancing diversity, equity and inclusion is critical to our mission and educational experience at Mendoza, as well as to the organizations our students will one day join,” said , the Martin J. Gillen Dean of the Mendoza College of Business. “We’re pleased to partner with the Diversity in Leadership Initiative as a way to serve a very diverse group of people and help to prepare them for their next step in either their careers or their business education.”

“If we are going to see the most complex business problems solved, we need diverse and ethical leadership at the highest levels — C-suite, boardroom, governance, regulatory and policy,” said , director of Graduate Recruiting & Admissions at Mendoza.��“Given the statistics of 8 percent of the Fortune 500 C-suite leadership roles are women and only 16 percent of the Fortune 100 C-suite is racially diverse, it’s clear that boards, executive teams and organizations are responsible for fostering such change.”

Participants are tasked with developing an understanding of key concepts, tools and frameworks learned through five courses including business analytics, leadership communication, accounting/finance, organizational strategy and leading change. They work with an executive coach for the duration of the program and apply what they’ve learned by completing a capstone project in their workplace.

“In that way, employers get a real ROI, a real return,” Jackson said. “And the individual now has an anchor experience which they can leverage to move up in the organization.”

Program graduates receive an executive mindset certification endorsed by all participating universities. They are also eligible to bypass the GMAT and GRE requirement for admission to graduate programs and are eligible for a streamlined admissions process into the business-related master program of their choice, along with a discount on tuition from any of the participating universities. Graduates also can leverage this experience to gain admission into Marian University’s doctorate in organizational leadership, should they meet the program’s entry requirements.

“At every stage of life, education is a catalyst,” said Stutsman y Márquez. “We know there are incredible disparities throughout our education system that impact access and opportunity based on factors such as race, ability, and socioeconomics. It is through partnerships such as these that create pathways to further education for those who aim to expand their capacity and impact within their industries, organizations, communities, families and beyond.”

University of Notre Dame researcher , an assistant professor of information technology, analytics and operations at the Mendoza College of Business, is part of a team working on a web-based natural language processing system that could increase the health literacy of patients who access their records through a patient portal. NoteAid, a project based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, conveniently translates medical jargon for health care consumers.

Lalor worked with the team to develop ComprehENotes, a tool to specifically evaluate electronic health record (EHR) note comprehension. They also used crowdsourced workers to compare how an active intervention like NoteAid, which automatically defines medical terms, improved a patient’s EHR literacy compared with simply having a passive system, such as MedlinePlus, available on the web. That study found that NoteAid significantly improved health literacy scores compared with those who had no resource and those who had MedlinePlus access.

“In both of those studies, we used crowdsourced workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk and found that the demographics of the participants didn’t overlap well with demographic groups typically associated with low health literacy — for example, older, less educated people,” Lalor said. “In this study, we wanted to see if the definition tool, NoteAid, was effective for actual patients at a hospital.”

For their latest study, published in the May issue of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the team recruited 174 people waiting for their appointments at a community hospital in Massachusetts.

Trial participants were shown either a NoteAid version of the ComprehENotes test, with medical jargon definitions that were viewable by hovering the mouse over the text, or a version without any definitions.

“We hypothesized that the NoteAid tool would, in fact, improve performance on our comprehension instrument, which it did,” Lalor said. Also, they found that the average score for hospital participants was significantly lower than the average score for the crowdsourced participants, which was consistent with the lower education levels in the community hospital sample and the overall impact of education level on test results.

These findings, Lalor explained, are significant for a few reasons. “First, by showing that NoteAid is effective for local patients we can generalize about its usefulness beyond crowdsourced workers to actual patients,” he said. “Same for our test of EHR note comprehension. Both of these are relevant now with the recent laws mandating patient access to their EHRs, including notes.”

Now that they have evidence that a natural language processing tool can significantly improve patient health literacy, Lalor says the team is working to evaluate and refine the dictionary the tool uses, from both a physician’s standpoint regarding accuracy and a patient’s standpoint in terms of reading level. Also, he noted, “The last piece is kind of a higher level question of what should even be included in the dictionary as a jargon term versus what is just a rare term, or something you might not understand, but is not critical to your note.”

Defining every word in a medical record could potentially overwhelm the patient. “If you know that they just need particular terms, they might be more likely to read them and internalize them and have a better understanding of the note,” he said.

At the undergraduate level, Lalor teaches an unstructured data analytics course. He also teaches in Mendoza’s . His research interests are in machine learning and natural language processing, specifically regarding model evaluation, quantifying uncertainty, model interpretability and applications in biomedical informatics.

was co-authored by Wen Hu, Matthew Tran, Kathleen Mazor and Hong Yu of the University of Massachusetts, and Hao Wu of Vanderbilt University.

Originally posted on .

As the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread globally in early 2020, doctors and policymakers emphasized the need to “flatten the curve,” or slow the spread of the virus over time. , an assistant business analytics professor at Notre Dame’s , and his colleagues, Feiyu Jiang of Tsinghua University and Xiaofeng Shao of the University of Illinois, wanted to build a statistical framework that could demonstrate if and how various policy interventions impacted the spread and death. They also wanted to provide a way for countries to understand the unique growth rate pattern within their borders.

“Our study aims to provide an accurate statistical model for the trajectory of the cumulative confirmed cases and deaths of COVID-19 in a given country, for example in the U.S.,” Zhao said.��“With an accurate statistical model, we can better understand the historical dynamics of the pandemic and if past public health interventions helped slow down the transmission. Furthermore, we can produce better forecasts of future confirmed cases, thus providing crucial information for data-driven public health decision-making.”

They documented their work in “,” forthcoming in the Journal of Econometrics.

Recognizing that the speed of the virus’s spread would change over time as governments and health officials mounted responses, the researchers used a time series analysis called a “piecewise linear model” to study the changes. The model allows researchers to look at the trajectory of cases and deaths and study the pace before and after governments enacted different measures to address the pandemic.

However, to do so, researchers needed a way to accurately account for unknown temporal dependencies in their data.

“The key difficulty of the piecewise linear model is that we do not know when the potential phase transitions of the pandemic growth happened beforehand, and thus we need to develop a statistical estimation technique to accurately estimate the unknown phase transition dates, aka change points, from the observed COVID-19 data,” Zhao explained. His research centers on change-point detection, an algorithmic technique used to detect changes or structural breaks in chronologically organized data points. Typically, such algorithms assume temporal independence in the data.

“The new change-point detection technique we developed extends the literature of change-point detection under unknown temporal dependence. We also developed some new theoretical tools to justify the proposed technique,” Zhao said.

Their model revealed similar spread patterns among countries with geographical proximity, particularly in continental Europe and developing Latin American countries.

“In addition,” they wrote, “the transition date from rapid growth phases to moderate growth phases is typically associated with the initiation of emergency measures such as lockdown and mass testing with contact tracing, which partially provides evidence that strict social distancing rules help slow down the virus growth and flatten the curve. Moreover, our analysis further indicates that compared to developed countries, most developing countries are still in the early stages of the pandemic and are generally less efficient in terms of controlling the spread of coronavirus, thus may need more international aids to help contain the epidemic.”

The researchers also demonstrate in their paper how the model can be used to make short-term predictions of COVID-19 cases and deaths. Their model is not intended to replace those built on epidemiology principles, they note. Rather, said Zhao, it offers public health officials a “simple and effective way to study the dynamics of the epidemic and to generate accurate one-week and two-week ahead forecasts of confirmed cases/deaths of COVID-19, which could provide crucial information for data-driven public health decision-making.”

In July, Zhao received a three-year, $100,000 National Science Foundation award for a project to develop a new statistical methodology and theory for change-point analysis of time series data. He teaches predictive analytics at the undergraduate and level.

Originally posted on .

For most, the divining rod is reputation. The importance consumers place on reputation influences how service providers do business in order to manage their image.

For firms that perform external audits, strategic reputation management likely involves charging riskier clients a premium and ensuring their clients do not make reporting decisions that could reflect badly on the audit firm.

It could also mean that auditors are selective when it comes to who is in their client portfolio and actively screen out companies whose past or potential future behavior might harm an auditor’s reputation. That strategy is what the University of Notre Dame’s and a group of researchers set out to explore in their paper “,” published in the Journal of Accounting and Economics. The paper is co-authored by Jonathan Cook of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, Michael Minnis of the University of Chicago, Andrew Sutherland of MIT and Karla Zehms of the University of Wisconsin.

“The central hypothesis of our paper is that an auditor’s reputation is in part formed by its client portfolio — auditors are known by the companies they keep,” they wrote. “Producers with a reputation for providing high quality services to high quality clients can, in turn, charge a premium.” They also propose that auditors with reputation-sensitive clients are least likely to accept or keep others with high misconduct risk.

Kowaleski, an assistant professor of accountancy at Notre Dame’s , likens it to the Aesop’s Fable about a man who, when in the market to buy a donkey, took time to observe how his potential purchase behaved with the rest of the animals in his herd. The donkey immediately made a companion of the most idle donkey in the stable, so the fable goes, and the man returned the animal to the seller, noting that it would act the same as the one he chose for its companion.

“The moral of the story: You are known by the company you keep,” Kowaleski said. “In this study, we demonstrate that this also appears to be true of auditors. We show that an auditor's clients have similar misbehavior profiles that are unrelated to audit work. Furthermore, we observe evidence that auditors protect their reputations by avoiding clients who could harm their reputation.”

An auditor’s reputation, he noted, can take a hit when its client is caught behaving illegally or unethically. “In 2016, KPMG received scrutiny in response to the Wells Fargo account opening scandal even though Wells Fargo financial statements were not materially misstated,” Kowaleski said of the company’s acknowledged awareness of the fake customer accounts created by bank employees.

To study how reputation concerns factor into auditor-client relationships, the researchers aggregated more than 1.2 million adviser records from the U.S. broker-dealer market between 2001 and 2017. They also created measures for auditor misconduct disclosures and auditor reputation sensitivity and examined auditor’s client acceptance and continuation decisions.

Newly formed relationships between auditors and clients offered the researchers one window into the question of whether the existing clients in an auditor’s portfolio and newly acquired clients share a similar track record of misconduct behavior. The researchers theorized that if new client misconduct has no litigation risk, or the risk is such that auditors can mitigate it simply by charging a premium, no relationship would be found. But even controlling for a number of factors, they found “an economically and statistically significant” relationship. They also found that “audit-client pairs that are mismatched with respect to misconduct separate sooner than other pairs.” In fact, auditors with high reputations and clients with high misconduct had the shortest of all relationships.

Some auditors cater to clients who are particularly concerned with their auditor’s reputation, such as a bank or IPO, and this concern is reflected in who those audit firms opt to add or remove from their client portfolio. “Thus far, our evidence indicates that both audit firms and individual audit offices avoid high misconduct broker-dealers when they have reputation-sensitive clients in non-broker-dealer markets,” Kowaleski said.

The study revealed higher misconduct rates among broker-dealer clients whose auditors did not also serve bank clients. This suggests that “misconduct matching stems from reputation concerns rather than specialization,” the researchers wrote. They also found that even if they eliminated misconduct such as fraud or forgery as well as clients whose audit risk is inherently higher, the results were the same, indicating that reputation concern and not simply litigation risk was a factor.

Their analysis of the reputation management aspect of audit-client relationships also revealed something unexpected. “We were surprised to find that an auditor’s reputation for accepting high-misconduct clients predicts their new clients’ future misconduct,” Kowaleski said. While he and his co-authors stress that it should not be interpreted causally, they found that clients matching with lower reputation auditors have a higher rate of new misconduct incidents in the next year. “While this finding does not discern between sorting and treatment mechanisms,” they wrote, “it could provide a useful reference point for the 56 percent of Americans who rely on financial advisers as their conduit to engage the financial markets.”

Kowaleski, who studies the effect of the institutional setting on behavior, says their analysis also helps academics “parse apart two theories that often move together — reputation and litigation risk — emphasizing that reputation is important on its own.” He adds that it could be helpful to regulators concerned with financial misbehavior in the broker-dealer industry, as it illuminates an "unintended consequence of audit mandates: non-discerning auditors emerge to serve clients with low endogenous demand for auditing."

Originally posted on .

Bonus payouts help investment companies retain good managers and maximize performance. But it turns out that competitive incentives aren’t the only type used to motivate mutual fund managers, according to , an assistant professor of finance at the University of Notre Dame’s . Some firms also appear to leverage cooperative incentives (e.g., bonuses based on advisor-level profitability or share ownership in the advisor) within a mutual fund family to drive manager behavior. Such incentives encourage managers to prioritize maximizing the value of the overall investment advisor and cross-subsidize their strategies, potentially at the expense of the manager’s own fund performance.��

Zambrana, along with Richard Evans of the University of Virginia and Melissa Prado of the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, explored the significance and ramifications of different incentive strategies for mutual fund families and their clients in their paper “,” published in April in the Journal of Financial Economics.��

“Our analysis helps to identify the impact of these two different compensation approaches and the characteristics of investment advisors who choose cooperative or competitive incentive schemes,” said Zambrana, who teaches corporate finance. “Because cooperative versus competitive incentives have important implications for the risk and return of funds, our results have important implications for institutional and retail investors and those investment professionals who manage their investments.”

Using publicly available data from actively managed U.S. mutual funds from between 1992-2015, the researchers looked at underlying compensation mechanisms as well as other indicators to gain insight into which fund families had relatively more cooperative or competitive environments. It turns out the incentive mechanism used has an impact on fund performance and risk and is associated with different clientele of these asset managers.��

When mutual fund families offer competitive incentives, funds perform better and have a greater percentage of star funds than cooperative advisors, the study found. However, the funds also experience greater return dispersion — more winners and losers — and more volatile cash flows. “We find that competitive incentives result in higher average performance consistent with either incentivizing greater effort on the part of managers or attracting managers with higher ability,” the authors wrote.��

When the researchers looked at those offering cooperative incentive schemes, they found lower-than-average fund performance but a better track record of retaining assets and more stable cash flows and returns. Cooperative incentives, they wrote, “align fund manager incentives with those of the firm. Fund managers are willing to sacrifice the performance of their own fund to support other funds in the family that are of strategic importance. The overall result is greater cash flow stability.” 

Cooperative advisors tended to manage assets for retail investors and market their fund offerings via a broker-distribution channel, the team found, noting that this is “consistent with investor demand for nonperformance characteristics.” The outcomes associated with each incentive scheme appeal to different types of investors, the researchers observed. They found that competitive fund families were more likely to manage institutional assets and distribute funds directly to more sophisticated investors. The “quality signal about each manager is clearer in a competitive fund family since fund performance is more likely to represent manager ability than intra-family support,” they wrote. “If institutional investors benefit from searching for superior managers, they would be more likely to search among competitively incentivized fund managers.” 

Based on their findings, Zambrana said, the competitive compensation model works well for fund families seeking institutional investors, who have lower search costs and greater ability to discern talented managers. “At the same time, for retail investors who are less able to discern manager skill, the greater dispersion in fund performance across funds managed by competitive advisors would result in greater investment risk,” he said.

These results provide insight in the importance of compensation incentives in assessing the potential added value and the effectiveness of collaboration of large investment organizations.

New research from the University of Notre Dame finds that companies need to do more than invest in analytics staff and systems in order to improve business performance. The attitude of the top management team (TMT) makes a critical difference, and their advocacy drives positive outcomes.

“Our findings reveal that while customer analytics use has a positive effect on firm performance at high levels of top management team advocacy, it actually has a negative effect on firm performance at low levels of TMT advocacy,” says , an associate professor of marketing at Mendoza College of Business who teaches core marketing courses in the .

Germann noticed that even as firms hired customer analytics teams and built databases, top leaders also had a level of skepticism regarding whether they were getting a good return on that investment. “Everyone’s trying to jump on this bandwagon, but many don’t really know how to do it,” he says. And not everyone is reaping the benefits, an outcome that he says is at odds with prior research that indicates customer analytics can have a strong, positive impact on business performance.

His study, “Driving Customer Analytics From the Top,” found that the level of advocacy from TMTs plays a significant role in the differing outcomes, even after controlling for key aspects of the firm’s strategy, technology, human capital and environment. The study, co-authored with Gary Lilien of Pennsylvania State University, Christine Moorman of Duke University and Lars Fiedler and Till Grossmass, McKinsey $ Co. partners, is forthcoming in the journal Customer Needs and Solutions.

The insight is consistent with a management theory known as upper echelons theory. “If you want to understand why firms do the things they do, you need to seek an understanding of the people at the top,” explains Germann, who has also served as an academic adviser to McKinsey & Co.

The decision to allocate resources and build an infrastructure isn’t enough. TMTs also need to create an organizational culture where customer analytics insights can inform decision-making and employees are empowered to execute those data-driven strategies effectively. Otherwise, he says, these investments become a cost to the firm.

“It’s really about establishing a culture within the firm where analytics are viewed as something important,” he says.

So how do firms do this? To find out, the researchers conducted in-depth interviews with senior executives from global consulting firms and well-known companies that make use of customer analytics. Across the board, the executives stressed the need for change management activities led by a hands-on top management team in order to successfully implement a customer analytics program.

The executives recommended that TMTs:

Identify customer analytics use cases. Vagueness from top leaders on what they want to do with the analytics, Germann says, is “usually a recipe for failure.” Firms need to identify and agree upfront on what problem they want to solve and what outcome they want to optimize through customer analytics.

Align business units. Without TMT involvement, the researchers were told, “different business units will likely not work together and share their data and insight.”

Focus on the highest places of leverage. In other words, focus on use cases with the greatest potential ROI and don’t neglect a feasibility analysis. Also, the executives told the team, consider kicking things off with a few smaller projects that can generate “quick wins” that will show the value that customer analytics can bring to the company.

Create ownership among businesses.��Because business unit leaders can become a bottleneck in the implementation process, it’s important to create ownership and develop buy-in at this level.

Facilitate mindset shift. Senior leadership should always ask how customer analytics informs any proposal or recommendation. This signals the importance of data-driven decisions to all those involved.

The true challenge for companies as they move forward with customer analytics investments is not on the technical side. “What many of our interviewees said is that the models and the analytics, that’s not the difficult part,” Germann says. “What’s really challenging is the organizational change that is required.”

Originally posted on .��

, an accountancy professor at the , and his co-authors identified several mechanisms that drive up costs for private firms that raise capital via public debt, including assumptions related to downside risk without easy access to the equity market and whether private equity ownership influence is at play.

Because private firms have no obligation to open up their books, comparing public and private firms has been challenging for researchers, Badertscher said. To control for this, his study focused on private firms that enter the public bond market. “In the U.S., if you issue public debt, the SEC views you as a public company, just like a company that has equity,” he explained. In other words, private firms are subject to the same Securities and Exchange Commission investor reporting and disclosure mandates as those owned by shareholders, giving researchers access to the same data sets for both types of firms.

“If the disclosure regimes were not the same, then it’s always going to be hard to answer that question of whether public and private firms are charged a different rate for their debt because you could say, ‘Well, gosh, the public ones have so much more disclosure. I’m willing to lend to them at a better rate because I can see everything they’re doing,’” he said. Because private firms have no obligation to open up their books, comparing public and private firms has been challenging for researchers, Badertscher said. To control for this, his study focused on private firms that enter the public bond market. “In the U.S., if you issue public debt, the SEC views you as a public company, just like a company that has equity,” he explained. In other words, private firms are subject to the same Securities and Exchange Commission investor reporting and disclosure mandates as those owned by shareholders, giving researchers access to the same data sets for both types of firms.

The researchers, who included Dan Givoly from Pennsylvania State University, Sharon Katz from INSEAD and Hanna Lee from the University of Maryland, examined 24 years of SEC-required financial disclosure statements from public and private companies that issued debt from 1987 to 2010. Their paper,  was published in earlier this year in Management Science.

They calculated the cost of public debt for private firms was about 100 basis points, or 1 percent, higher than for a similar public firm. “Depending on the level of debt that you have, that’s pretty significant,” Badertscher said.

The study also found that private firms received lower S&P 500 bond ratings. Specifically, private firms had an average rating that was 0.273 lower than public firms on a scale from 1 to 21, with 1 corresponding to an AAA rating and 21 to a D ranking.

The researchers were able to demonstrate that having easier access to equity lowers a firm’s cost of debt and that financing constraints have a stronger impact on the cost of debt for private corporations compared with public firms. “Having equity is kind of like having another way to raise more money,” he said. In a crisis, the public firm could, in theory, go back to the market and get more equity.

Even having “deep-pocketed owners” did not completely offset the impact of limited access to the equity market for private companies, according to the study, which also found that the risk related to equity accessibility “is particularly acute during recessions, as private owners are less likely to make cash injections while they are already tightening their belts.”

The study also compared the private firms to one another and found variations in the cost of debt within the sample. Some of those differences, they found, could be attributed to private equity ownership in the company. More than two-thirds of the private firm sample were owned by private equity firms. “The risk there is that they’re quite aggressive,” Badertscher said. “They’re risk-seeking entities. They’re looking for high returns, the private equity firms.”

Originally published by Melissa Jackson at on May 6.

A new MBA competition hosted by the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business will focus on innovative business uses for blockchain, the distributed database technology that powers cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Teams from seven business schools will share their ideas and compete for $10,000 in prize money during the  from 1 to 5 p.m. April 20 (Friday) in Mendoza’s Jordan Auditorium. The event, sponsored by Thomson Reuters, is open to the public.��

This is the first year for the national MBA case competition, which was organized by the Notre Dame MBA Tech Club. The contest drew 20 teams from 11 universities across the country for the qualifying round in March. Eight teams, including two from Notre Dame, advanced to the finals and will present before a panel of industry experts Friday during . The other finalists are from Arizona State University, Cornell University, Tuck 91��Ƶ of Business at Dartmouth University, University of California-Irvine, University of Maryland and Washington University in St. Louis.

Blockchain’s potential as a powerful business tool made the emerging technology a natural choice for the competition. “It’s a new way to look at how data is managed in certain scenarios,” says Vinod Krishnadas, president of the Notre Dame MBA Tech Club and a 2018 MBA candidate at Mendoza. “There’s a very strong use case for blockchain applications.”

First prize is $6,000; second prize is $3,000; and third prize is $1,000.

Judges for the final round are David Fowler, senior marketing director for the Midwest Business Unit at SAP America Inc.; Adam Kupperman, vice president of go-to-market for ONESOURCE at Thomson Reuters; Scott Nestler, associate teaching professor of management at Mendoza; Jim Seida, associate professor of accountancy at Mendoza; Heather Walker, vice president of product management for indirect tax and transfer pricing at Thomson Reuters; and Jon West, vice president of software engineering in the tax and accounting division of Thomson Reuters.

The event is co-sponsored by SAP.

Contact: Praneeth Kavuri, vkavuri@nd.edu

Originally published by Melissa Jackson at on April 16.