Sustainability Auditing Expert to Speak at MBA Sustainability Diploma Ceremony

The Donahue Graduate School of Business will host a diploma ceremony for the 2013 graduating class of the MBA Sustainability program this Friday, July 26, at 2 p.m. in the Power Center Ballroom. Bob McCutcheon, a managing partner in the Pittsburgh office of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), will be the guest speaker at the ceremony.

McCutcheon serves as PwC’s U.S. industrial products leader, through which he works with complex accounting and regulatory issues involving multinational organizations operating in diverse economic sectors, including aerospace and defense; chemicals; engineering and construction; forest products, paper and packaging; manufacturing; metals; and transportation and logistics. McCutcheon previously headed PwC’s global sustainability practice.

This year’s class of 21 students is the sixth to graduate from the accelerated MBA Sustainability program, which features a curriculum where best practices for the ethical management of financial, human and financial resources are fundamental in all coursework.

The MBA Sustainability program attracts students with a wide variety of backgrounds and perspectives. A member of the graduating class is a Fulbright Scholar from Palestine, another a Peace Corp Fellow and one student is an Alcoa Fellow and a former AmeriCorps volunteer. This year, the students’ fieldwork took them to Europe as well as India, where they prepared case studies on the safety and security of the food supply.

Every student worked on two consulting projects and a practicum, and clients included Green Building Alliance, Phipps, FedEx, Duquesne Light, UPMC and Venture Outdoors. In addition, four members of the class formed a team that placed third in the Aspen Institute’s 2013 Business & Society International MBA Case Competition.

McCutcheon, a partner in one of the Big Four accounting firms with expertise in sustainability issues, is a particularly apt speaker for this group of graduates according to Bill O’Rourke, executive director of the Beard Institute and former vice president for sustainability of Alcoa. It is increasingly common, O’Rourke pointed out, for corporations to have external auditors check and verify the accuracy of nonfinancial numbers related to emissions, water usage and discharge, safety, philanthropy and energy consumption appearing in their sustainability and other public reports.

“Digging into the details can uncover errors, missing data and duplicate reporting, so corporations need to work with the audit experts for accuracy,” O’Rourke said. “There have been proposals, but no regulations as yet, by the SEC (Securities Exchange Commission) to require independent verification for some of these numbers in the not too distant future.”