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Associate professor Deborah Turner thinks the U.S. Congress needs to take an accounting class. "Congress puzzles me when it makes tax cuts without reducing spending," says Turner, an associate professor of accounting in the College of Management. "It is really troublesome to those who think about things like this every day."
A CPA with her bachelor's and master's degrees and PhD in accounting from Georgia State University, Turner has taught managerial accounting, financial reporting and taxation classes at Tech for 20 years. She believes the idea of a "simplified tax code" is fantasy.
"It is all talk when they talk about simplifying the tax code," Turner says. Congress has tried before, she observed, and "it never comes out simple, it is always more complex."
Turner has earned the 2004 Class of 1940 W. Roane Beard Outstanding Teaching Award. She has been published in Accounting Horizons, Management Accounting, Advances in Taxation and the Journal of Applied Business Research. She is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the American Accounting Association, the Financial Executives Institute and the American Women's Society of Public Certified Accountants, which has twice awarded her for outstanding contributions to accounting literature.
Turner has passed on her love of learning by instilling an appreciation in her students for what could be considered a dry discipline.
"I teach every level from our executive master's degree program to PhD to undergraduate and it gives you so much perspective to see how each type of student views the importance of accounting," she says. "Our executives bring in all of this experience and they appreciate the importance of it, but I do teach prerequisite courses and I have a passion for the knowledge and how I can convince those students that this is important."
©2005 Georgia Tech Alumni Association
