Auburn alumna Erin Towery (accounting ’03) has won research and teaching awards and published groundbreaking work in top-tier journals that have attracted media attention. Today, the University of Georgia accounting professor is helping shape the country’s economic policy as a senior economist with the White House Council of Economic Advisors (CEA).

The CEA, which consists of three members and their research staff, provides the president with research-based economic advice used to formulate domestic and international economic policy.

Towery was recruited to serve as a senior economist because of her tax expertise. Her research lies at the intersection of taxation, financial reporting and corporate finance.

According to Towery, among the current tax-related issues that will influence economic policy are the scheduled expiration next year of income tax cuts signed into law in 2017 and the Global Tax Agreement, which is designed to ensure that multinational companies pay a minimum level of tax on their income.

Applying insightful research

Towery has conducted impactful research on corporate tax and financial reporting incentives that are relevant to these topics.

She and her coauthors conducted a study that examined the effectiveness of the Internal Revenue Service’s Coordinated Industry Case (CIC) program, through which certain large corporations are audited every year. The study was published in Contemporary Accounting Research.

“We found that it doesn’t change [the company’s tax compliance] behavior very much,” she said about firms that were assigned to the CIC program. “The program is expensive, so the findings were very helpful to the IRS in thinking about how to redesign the program.”

In another study, Towery and her colleagues looked at the effect that IRS budget cuts had on the audit process for large public corporations during the 2010s. “We showed that by cutting the IRS budget, they lost billions of dollars [in tax revenue] just on the corporate side,” she said.

They published their research results in the March 2020 issue of The Accounting Review, and their findings were picked up by mainstream media outlets like CBS News, among others. Their paper recently won the 2024 AICPA-sponsored Notable Contributions to Accounting Literature award.

As a senior economist, Towery conducts analysis to help inform economic policy and contributes to the annual economic report of the President, which is published each spring. With this being an election year, she also follows and analyzes the tax proposals of both presidential candidates.

When her term ends in July, Towery will return to her faculty position as the KPMG-Atlanta Partners’ and Employees’ Professor in the J.M. Tull School of Accounting at the University of Georgia.

Although she has won multiple teaching awards, Towery said the best part of teaching is when former students tell her how much her class encouraged them to go into accounting.

“That’s pretty powerful because the accounting profession is facing a declining enrollment issue right now,” said Towery, who teaches introductory-level accounting courses, which students take before declaring a major.

Auburn's foundational education

Towery credits the late Charles [Chuck] Price, an esteemed professor of taxation at Auburn, for sparking her interest in the accounting and taxation fields. His class, she said, gave her an understanding of the tax law and how the government incentivizes many things—charitable giving, home ownership and work, for example— through the tax code.

She also appreciates Professor Kimberly Key, the PwC professor of accounting in the Harbert College of Business, whom she had for two classes and who inspired her to pursue a career in taxation.

“My Auburn accounting education prepared me to handle anything that comes my way in the business world, and it equipped me to be in practice,” said Towery, who worked for PwC in New York City after earning her bachelor’s degree in 2003 and later earning her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. “It gave me a very strong foundation for a career in business.”

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