Don't Reveal Your Ignorance: Incorporating Cybersecurity into the Accounting Curriculum.

Abstract

In today's business world, cybersecurity is critical to success for all leaders including accountants. Interestingly, despite increased regulatory and professional emphasis, most accounting curricula limit cybersecurity coverage to accounting information systems courses. We argue that cybersecurity concepts should be introduced at all levels of the accounting curriculum. We provide six short, open-ended cases highlighting the increasing need to incorporate cybersecurity into the accounting curriculum. One or more of the cases can be used in introductory, core, and/or advanced accounting classes to emphasize the importance of cybersecurity for accounting students. The cases can be worked as individual assignments or in student groups. These cases address cybersecurity disclosure issues in financial reporting, the impact of a cybersecurity breach in financial audit, the risks to tax preparers of storing personally identifiable information, calculating and evaluating costs of cybersecurity breaches, and examining cybersecurity disclosures in 10-Ks.