Overview

Gender

male

W. Steve Albrecht is the Gunnell Endowed Professor in the Marriott School of Management and a Wheatley Fellow at Brigham Young University. Dr. Albrecht, a certified public accountant (CPA), certified internal auditor (CIA), and certified fraud examiner (CFE), came to BYU after teaching at Stanford and the University of Illinois.

Earlier, William worked for Deloitte.

William received a Bachelor’s degree in Accounting from Brigham Young University and his MBA and Ph.D. (Accounting) degrees from the University of Wisconsin. While a Professor, William has been extremely involved in the business world. Following are the highlights of his academic and professional career.

Professor Wiliam has had much success and many leadership positions in academia. From 1998 to 2008, William was the Associate Dean of the Marriott School. During that period, the Marriott School went from being unranked to being ranked as a top 15 MBA program and for having the number 7 ranked undergraduate business program.

For the previous nine years, William was Director of the School of Accountancy at BYU which rose to be one of the top three ranked accounting programs in the United States under his leadership.

William served as President of the American Accounting Association, the organization of accounting professors in the U.S., Beta Alpha Psi, the accounting student honors fraternity and the Accounting Program Leadership Group.

William also chaired the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) Accounting Accreditation Committee from 2000-2003.

From 2002-2004 William was Chair of the AICPA’s Pre-Certification Executive Education Committee.

From 2004-2007, William served as the U.S. representative on the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) Education Committee.

William has done extensive research on business fraud and ethics. William's research has resulted in the publication of over one hundred articles in professional and academic journals. William is the author or co-author of over 25 books or monographs, several of which are on fraud, integrity and financial accounting. His financial and principles of accounting textbooks are in their 14th editions and his fraud text is in its 5th edition. In 2000, William completed a major study (Accounting Education: Charting the Course through a Perilous Future) on the future of accounting education in the U.S. William is an outstanding teacher who has taught classes in financial and managerial accounting, auditing, fraud and corporate governance.

William has received numerous awards and honors, including BYU’s highest faculty honor, the Karl G. Maeser Distinguished Faculty Lecturer Award, for superior scholarship and teaching. William has also received the Marriott School of Management’s Outstanding Faculty Award and the BYU Maeser Research Award. William has been recognized by Beta Alpha Psi, the Federation of Schools of Accountancy, the Auditing Section of the American Accounting Association, the Utah Association of CPAs and the AICPA as Educator of the Year. William also received awards for outstanding teaching at Stanford University, the University of Illinois, and the University of Wisconsin. In 2001, in recognition of William's contributions to BYU and to academia, an anonymous donor endowed the W. Steve Albrecht Professorship in Accounting and the LeAnn Albrecht fellowship in accounting. In August, 2015 Professor Albrecht received the prestigious Lifetime Service Award from the American Accounting Association.

William has also enjoyed considerable success with his work in the business world. William has consulted with numerous organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, major financial institutions, the United Nations, FBI, and other organizations and has been retained as an expert witness in 36 major fraud cases. William's work on Internal Controls and Fraud Prevention, Detection and Investigation has brought him wide acclaim. William was the first president of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, a fraud-fighting organization now with 70,000 members.

William was a former Member of the Board of Regents of the Institute of Internal Auditors and the Board of Directors of the Utah Association of CPAs.

William served on the task force of the American Institute of CPAs that wrote SAS 82, a fraud auditing standard and on the FASAC, an advisory committee to the FASB.

From 1997 to 2000 William was a Trustee of the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations (COSO), the organization that wrote the internal control standards used by most corporations and the AICPA Council from 2000-2003.

From 2005-2009, William served as a Trustee of the Financial Accounting Foundation that oversees both the FASB and GASB. William was recognized, as part of Utah’s Centennial Celebration, as one of 131 Utahns who have made outstanding contributions or brought unusual recognition to the state. In 1997, 2001, 2002 and 2003 and 2004 William was chosen as one of the 100 most influential accounting professionals in the United States by Accounting Today magazine. In 1998, William received the Cressey Award from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, the highest award given for a lifetime of achievement in fraud detection and deterrence. In 2002, in honor of William's contribution in fighting fraud, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners named one of its headquarter buildings in Austin, Texas after Dr. Albrecht.

William has served on the boards of directors of four public companies (SkyWest Airlines, Cypress SemiConductor, RedHat, Inc., and SunPower Corporation) and four private companies (ICON Health & Fitness, Bonneville International, Sallie Mae Bank and Deseret Mutual Benefit Administrators (DMBA)).

In 2009, William resigned from all of these boards to accept a 3-year volunteer position as president of the Japan Tokyo Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where he and his wife supervised the volunteer efforts of approximately 500 young people.

Since returning from Japan in 2012, William has rejoined three of the public company boards –Red Hat, Inc., Cypress SemiConductor and SkyWest Airlines (the other public company was sold to a French entity) and the DMBA private company board. In 2006, he was named by Utah Business as one of its first class of top five corporate directors in the state of Utah.

In 2013 William was included in the NACD Directorship 100, being named one of the top 50 Corporate Directors in America. William has chaired the audit committee of every board he has served on and has been a member of compensation, nomination/governance, long-range planning, safety and other committees.

William teaches the MBA corporate governance and board of director class at BYU.

William is the author of The Board of Directors and Corporate Governance, a 584-page book published in 2015.

William is married to the former LeAnn Christiansen of Waukesha, Wisconsin and they have six children (five sons and one daughter) and twenty six grandchildren. Three of his sons are in the medical profession, two are college professors and his daughter is a full-time homemaker (her husband is currently attending pursuing a Ph.D.) William has held numerous leadership and volunteer positions in his church and the community, including coaching little league baseball, basketball, football and soccer for over 20 years.