Internal Controls: Guidance for Private, Government, and Nonprofit Entities

Lynford Graham is a Certified Public Accountant with more than 25 years of public accounting experience in audit practice and in national policy  development groups. He is currently a consultant on professional accounting and auditing matters and an author.

Dr. Graham is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), and a recent past member of the Auditing Standards Board. He chaired the AICPA’s Audit Risk Guide Task Force ("Assessing and Responding to Audit Risk in a Financial Statement Audit") and was the U.S. representative to the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB) Materiality Task Force (ISA 320 and 450). He previously served as a member of the AICPA’s Materiality and Audit Risk Task Force (SAS 47); was a founding member of the AICPA’s Information Technology Section, serving on its Executive Committee; and was a member of the AICPA’s  Statistical Sampling Subcommittee during the development of SAS 39 on Audit Sampling. He drafted the 2007 revision of the AICPA Audit Guide, Audit Sampling. Previously he chaired the Educator-Practitioner Case Development Task Force for the annual AICPA Education Conference and served on the Executive Committee of the Pre-Certification Education Committee.

He is a former partner and the national director of audit policy for BDO Seidman, LLP. There Dr. Graham was responsible for the development and implementation of audit policy and software, as well as Assurance Services Learning and Education programs, and was the firm’s sampling coordinator. He served on several international BDO Seidman task forces developing audit software, audit methodology, sampling approaches, and audit automation techniques. Dr. Graham was responsible for BDO Seidman’s implementationof audits of internal control under PCAOB AS 2 and participated with professional groups in developing industry-wide guidance on audits of internal control. Prior to joining BDO Seidman LLP, Dr. Graham was an associate professor of accounting and information systems and a graduate faculty fellow at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, where he taught primarily financial accounting courses. Prior to joining Rutgers, he was a national accounting & SEC consulting partner for Coopers & Lybrand, responsible for their technical issues research function and database, auditing research, and sampling techniques.

A Certified Fraud Examiner and a member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, Dr. Graham has provided consulting guidance on matters of internal control and statistical and audit methods, including inventory sampling problems, fraud investigations, litigation consulting, cost reimbursement studies and loan reviews. He has also worked with a variety of government agencies on the development and implementation of audit regulations.

Throughout his career he has maintained an active profile in the academic as well as the business community. A member of the American Accounting Association (AAA), he served as vice chairman of the Auditing Section and as a member of numerous committees and task forces. Dr. Graham had a leadership role in the development of Coopers & Lybrand’s award winning "Excellence in Audit Education" materials, widely used in university audit courses in the 1990s. He is the past auditing section chair for the Mid-Atlantic Section of the AAA. In 2002 he received the Distinguished Service Award of the Auditing Section of the AAA. His numerous academic and business  publications span a variety of topical areas, including information systems, internal controls, expert systems, audit risk, audit planning, fraud, sampling, analytical procedures, audit judgment, and international accounting and auditing.

Dr. Graham holds an MBA in Industrial Management and a PhD in Business and Applied Economics, both from the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton School).

He is also coeditor of the Accountant’s Handbook 11th Edition (JohnWiley & Sons, 2007) as well as coauthor or editor of many other audit and accounting books and publications.