Colleen Boland

Senior Economic Research Fellow (2019-2021)

Colleen Boland was a Senior Economic Research Fellow in the Office of Economic and Risk Analysis at the PCAOB between  August 2019 and June 2021.  An Associate Professor of Accounting at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she obtained her Ph.D. in Accounting from Michigan State University. Before her doctoral program, she spent over twenty years in public and private accounting, primarily conducting internal control audits in compliance with Single Audit requirements and guiding various sized nonprofit and governmental organizations' senior management and boards of directors. Boland is collaborating with Nick Galunic of the Office of Economic and Risk Analysis to study technology adoption in public company audits by documenting technology adoption in different audit areas to create an issuer-specific audit-year measure of technology adoption. The project also includes plans to document who, within an audit team, is using a given technology and the technology's impact on the audit production function. To complement this, Boland is planning a survey at the issuer level to explore potential friction points from the issuer's perspective. View her publications on SSRN.