Speaker Biographies
WILL YANCEY, PH.D, CPA, is an internationally recognized expert on sampling for tax and unclaimed property audits. Dr. Yancey is a self-employed consultant in Dallas, Texas. He actively consults, testifies, writes, and presents on sampling for corporations, professional organizations, and tax administrators. Dr. Yancey has made dozens of presentations on sampling and audit issues to associations including the American Bar Association, Council on State Taxation, Federation of Tax Administrators, Institute for Professionals in Taxation, Multistate Tax Commission, Tax Executives Institute, and others. In 1997 his article on sampling was published in the COST State Tax Report. In 1999 he won the IPT Literary Award for another paper on tax audit sampling. He made presentations on audit sampling in Poland and Ireland. His website willyancey.com has many useful links and citations on audit sampling.
Dr. Yancey earned five university degrees: Bachelor of Arts from Dartmouth College, Master of Forestry from Duke University, Bachelor of Accounting from the University of Minnesota Duluth, Master of Business Taxation from University of Minnesota Minneapolis, and Doctor of Philosophy in Accounting from University of Texas at Austin. He taught business school courses at various universities in Texas in 1987 to 2000. He began his accounting career with Peat Marwick, and has worked for others as a public accountant, consultant, and corporate controller.
DR. DONALD ROBERTS received his PhD in statistics from Stanford University in 1959 and joined the faculty at the University of Illinois where he taught until 2002.
He spent the years 1964-1967 at Ernst & Ernst where he first began his long association with audit sampling. In 1970, Dr. Roberts was invited to be a member of the AICPA statistical sampling subcommittee where he served for 8 years. His book, Statistical Auditing, was written during this period and published by the AICPA. From 1979-1984 he was a member of the American Statistical Association Committee on Statistics in Accounting and from 1980-1987 served on the National Research Council Subcommittee on Auditing Applications. In 1984 he was appointed to the AICPA Internal Accounting Control Task Force. In 1985, Dr. Roberts was invited to become the statistical consultant to Computer Audit Specialists of the IRS, a position he held until 2006.
He has appeared as an expert witness in tax cases for the IRS as well as some States. In addition, he has served as a consultant to several public accounting firms as well as the Department of Health and Human Services.
Dr. Roberts has designed and presented many workshops on use of statistical sampling in auditing for several public accounting firms, and States. In addition, he has frequently taught the Advanced Statistical Sampling course for the IRS.