Accounting Today, American Accounting Association Defends Its Legal Status:

The American Accounting Association reassured its members last week about its legal standing after a professor raised questions about several errors in the series of entities set up by the group of accounting educators and researchers.

The dustup started with an academic paper by William Dennis Huber, a professor at Capella University in Minneapolis, which was published in the Journal of Forensic & Investigative Accounting, entitled, Does the American Accounting Association Exist? An Example of Public Document Research. In the paper, he noted that the organization, which dates back to 1916, had been re-incorporated in 1935 and administratively dissolved by the Illinois Secretary of State for failure to file an annual report. In 1995. …

Huber circulated a link to his paper via email to the press in recent weeks after writing to AAA members over the past year. The AAA, in a communication with its members last week, criticized Huber’s email-writing campaign, but essentially admitted to many of the findings. … An AAA official who asked not to be identified said the organization was puzzled by Huber’s stance and characterized the problems as “an administrative hiccup common in the nonprofit world.” …

Huber feels that the organization has a responsibility to clear up the mess. “They’re saying these are just innocent mistakes,” he said. “OK, but these are mostly accounting professors. They’re supposed to be teaching accounting ethics to their students. If they were auditing a company that had these kinds of errors, they would not overlook it, but yet they want the errors to be overlooked by their own corporation, and I just can’t agree with that. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong.”