Isaac Yamoah earned a Deloitte Foundation Fellowship some 30 years after his advisor did

Isaac Yamoah, whose family moved to the United States from Ghana, spent nearly a decade as an internal and external auditor but felt a calling to a role where he could have an even greater influence, a career in academia. Yamoah has found Gies College of Business to be the right place to help kickstart that calling. In four years at Gies, while pursuing a PhD in accountancy, Yamoah’s impact has been felt by the faculty and students he has interacted with, and his excellence in research and teaching has been recognized.

A past recipient of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) Fellowship, Isaac received the 2025 Gies College of Business Alumni’s (GBAA) Excellence in Teaching for Teaching Assistants.

Most recently, Yamoah earned a $25,000 Deloitte Foundation Fellowship. The awards are given to 10 top accounting PhD candidates in the country and are intended to strengthen the pipeline of the accounting faculty by supporting PhD candidates who plan to pursue academic careers. The award helps cover expenses during the final year of coursework and the subsequent year to complete their doctoral dissertation.

Ironically, Yamoah almost didn’t enter the accounting field. Growing up, he wanted to be a dentist. However, after each semester of high school, his dad, an engineer by trade, would graph Isaac’s grades and, in collectively analyzing those graphs, Yamoah decided to switch away from the sciences and chose accounting because “I think numbers came naturally for me,” he said.

Yamoah was successful “in his prior life (that’s how he refers to his career before Gies),” rising to Lead/IT Audit Manager for Southern Company out of Atlanta. But he felt it was time for a change.

“I enjoyed seeing how auditors decide on what to report and how to interact with client management,” he said. “That led me to pursue a career in academia.”

But Yamoah sees this decision as more than just a career choice. First, his career pivot had a lot to do with his satisfaction in mentoring junior auditors in training.

“It was always interesting for me, in part because, while they learned a lot in college, it was time for them to shift from consuming information to applying it,” he said. “I found it important because eventually, they would be the ones making critical decisions for the company.”

Yamoah hopes to play a part in repopulating the accounting workforce. Since COVID, he indicates that many accountants have decided to pursue equally high-paying jobs in other fields like finance.

Isaac’s PhD research project looks at how novice auditors exercise professional skepticism when interacting with more experienced client management. His research suggests that affirming staff auditors is important, especially during consultations with intimidating clients when collecting audit evidence. 

Yamoah is involved in a few other projects with colleagues from Gies and elsewhere. His research stream focuses on judgment and decision-making in auditing: emerging technology, professional skepticism, individual differences, and litigation. He is currently revising a manuscript that investigates auditors’ discounting of quality AI-based expert advice for publication in Contemporary Accounting Research – one of the premier journals in the academy. 

Yamoah received the Gies Research Funding grant of $35,918 for his research investigating Investor Relations professionals and information access. In 2023, he won the American Accounting Association Accounting Behavior & Organizations Outstanding Emerging Scholar Award for his research examining how auditors cope with digital transformation in the profession.

“Two things that separate Isaac are his creativity and his ability to ideate multiple, clever tests of theory in a short period of time that shed light on hot-button issues in today’s rapidly changing business world,” said Yamoah’s advisor Mark Peecher, Executive Associate Dean of Faculty and Research and Deloitte Professor of Accountancy. Ironically, Peecher won the same Deloitte Fellowship 30 years ago.

“He has a larger number of high-quality working papers than I typically see from students who are at his stage of the doctoral program,” Peecher continued. “Instead of ‘just’ a promising dissertation idea and a promising working paper under review at a top journal, he has that and more.” 

While Yamoah has found research projects empowering, he has also found a passion for teaching. He has taught Accounting Control Systems and has served as a teaching assistant for two data analytics courses, Data Analytics Foundation for Accountancy and Data Analytics Applications in Accountancy. He has twice appeared on the List of Teaching Assistants Ranked as Excellent by Their Students. He received the Alan J. and Joyce D. Baltz Fellowship and the Gies Business Alumni Association Excellence-in-Teaching Assistant Award.

In group projects, he has made a practice of mixing students who have a quick understanding of a concept with those who are struggling to understand.

“I like to be able to figure out what the strengths and weaknesses of the students are and use that to help them learn,” he said.

Yamoah also makes sure each student project has a different spokesperson, a practice that he said has real-world implications.

“One of the things we hear from professionals is that accountants are not always good at communicating,” he said. “I think by having them present to a smaller group of their peers, they are further enhancing their communication skills.”

Yamoah is on pace to complete his PhD in 2026 and can’t imagine doing so anywhere else.

“The support here is great and so is the flexibility in terms of classes that you take and the people that you work with,” Yamoah said. “I have projects with at least four different faculty.  Gies has been a fantastic place for me as far as my academic journey and if I had to do it again, it would be Gies.”