Daniela DePrizio and Amanda Sanseverino, Ph.D. along with other students and professors who presented their research.
DANIELA DEPRIZIO / COURTESY
Mary Haley, Marketing Chair/Assistant Features Editor
The Journal of Financial Crime has two new Manhattan University bylines, Amanda Sanseverino, Ph.D. and senior Daniela DePrizio. Together for a year and a half, the pair worked on their research pertaining to, “extraterritorial laws and the accounting profession.”
The research focused on understanding the legal landscape related to corporate social responsibility issues, examining bribery and human rights issues like human slavery and their legal implications globally. Additionally, they dove into the extra-territoriality of these laws and how different countries enforce them, with a particular emphasis on understanding the legal and social aspects of these complex international issues.
Sanseverino, an accounting, computer information systems and law department professor, became interested in anti-corruption research during her doctoral studies around 2017, when she discovered extraterritorial laws that applied to companies doing business in different countries. She was drawn to researching how these laws could help curb corporate misconduct, particularly bribery and corruption, by applying regulations to multinational companies regardless of the location of their headquarters. Her initial research focused on the UK Bribery Act and its impact on U.S. companies’ operations in high-risk corruption countries.
“[This research] is kind of a culmination of what I’ve been thinking about and trying to bring this more to light for accounting practitioners,” Sanseverino said. “Of course, not to suggest that people in the field have no clue what’s going on, but there are just so many, even indirect kinds of effects that [these laws] could have. So that’s where we landed, and it ended up working out really well.”
DePrizio, an accounting and management student, was drawn to this project because of the social issues at hand and an interest in a career in law. She helped research the laws that deal with bribery, built a guide and wrote a rough draft of the research paper that was then presented at the American Accounting Association (AAA) by Sanseverino and published in the Journal of Financial Crime. The journal describes it as a collection that, “publishes authoritative, practical and detailed insight in the most serious and topical issues relating to the control and prevention of financial crime and related abuse.”
“I was so happy that [the editors] saw the value in the article and for the journal to be so well aligned with the scope of our article and what we were focused on,” Sanseverino said. “That leads me to think the readership will have a particular interest in the article. So it gives me more confidence, because it seems like that publication outlet is so well suited for our article that readers of that journal will be the ones who it will benefit most, and that it’ll get into the right hands.”
DePrizio, on the other hand, presented the research to MU, as a part of the Thieke Fellowship.
“I wasn’t really nervous, because I felt really prepared for it,” DePrizio said. “Dr. Sanseverino and I worked on the presentation beforehand. I was presenting with three other students and we all had 15 minutes. I will say, what got me a little nervous was during question time, because I was nervous someone would ask a question that I would not know how to answer, but I was able to figure it out and talk myself through it.”
The project naturally came with challenges. Spanning a year and a half, it even continued while DePrizio studied abroad in Prague. Time differences made collaboration difficult, so much of the work during that period happened individually or over email. Classes DePrizio took while abroad added a new perspective to conducting this research.
“I took a course that touched on [responsibility], so they were doing it from the American perspective, looking [at] America being the outsiders,” DePrizio said. “The way that Dr. Sanseverino and I approached it was like, ‘What do other countries require American countries to do?’ So it was just very different, hearing the other perspectives.”
Beyond the publication itself, DePrizio credits the experience with shaping her professional direction, as well as giving her insight into a field outside of her major.
“I would say this experience taught me how to research, which sounds kind of ridiculous, but that was so helpful for me,” DePrizio said. “Research is also an opportunity to explore something that maybe isn’t your major. I’m not [political science] or law, and so that was my chance to kind of explore something in that realm, and it just solidified for me that that is what I want to do.”