On June 4–5, USC Leventhal School of Accounting, the USC SEC and Financial Reporting Institute, and Financial Executives International co-hosted the 44th Annual SEC and Financial Reporting Conference. The two-day event, which took place at Town & Gown, included panels and remarks on shifting regulatory conditions, financial reporting, and the implementation of artificial intelligence within the sector.

“While we all may operate in different corners of the accounting profession, one thing I love about this conference is it reflects something we all believe in deeply, which is improving the quality and the relevance and the impact of accounting information and the decisions that depend on it,” said Leventhal Dean Andy Call in his opening remarks.

Call also commented on the changing nature of the regulatory community, which, like many industries, has experienced major overhauls following AI integration.

“As you all know, the profession is evolving quite rapidly with new technologies, new regulatory challenges, changing stakeholder expectations,” Call said. “We hope the discussions at this conference will be fruitful and illuminate some of these developments and create opportunities for meaningful dialogue that will benefit all of us.”

In the opening keynote session, Kurt Hohl, chief accountant at the SEC, echoed Call’s remarks on new technologies. Hohl expanded on new implementations of AI within the SEC, highlighting three areas of common usage: financial statements, auditing, and regulation through the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB).

“If I returned to public accounting today, I probably wouldn’t recognize it,” Hohl said. “I’d be out of my element because it’s rapidly changing how the accounting firms are operating. They're using generative AI and agentic AI in their audit testing and their audit procedures to improve audit quality.”

While officials expressed the need for purposeful AI integration, they also conveyed concerns about its potential drawbacks. In the panel entitled, “Current AI Implementation Issues,” Michael Dusza, deputy chief accountant at the SEC, pointed out issues with chatbot hallucinations, model drifts, biases, a lack of output explanation, and data usage.

Nevertheless, Dusza acknowledged the adoption of the technology within companies.

“It feels like companies expect their employees at many different levels within the organization to be innovators, to use technology in creative ways,” Dusza said. “That does obviously also introduce new risks and requires new approaches to governance and around these risks.”