Dr. Thomas L. Porter
Vice President
Education
PhD in accounting, University of Washington
MBA, Georgia Institute of Technology
BS in accounting and finance, University of Maryland
Experience
Dr. Porter is a Certified Public Accountant and a specialist in financial reporting. He is an expert on Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), Generally Accepted Auditing Standards (GAAS), SEC Regulations, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), and certain tax issues. He has applied his expertise to cases involving valuation, bankruptcy and commercial damages. He holds the Certified in Financial Forensics (CFF) credential from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA).
Dr. Porter has been qualified at arbitration hearings and at courts, including Delaware Chancery Court, as an accounting expert. Dr. Porter has testified on behalf of both claimants and respondents in disputes involving special purpose entities (SPEs), cost allocation, the reasonableness of choices within GAAP, disclosure adequacy, and tax savings embedded in settlement agreements for IRS Listed Transactions. Dr. Porter has extensive expertise in the accounting issues involved in options backdating, subprime mortgage securitizations and reporting the effectiveness of hedging activities.
Dr. Porter has presented on accounting and valuation topics to a variety of audiences including companies, law firms, bar associations, and industry groups. Dr. Porter is concurrently an adjunct professor at Boston College where he teaches financial statement analysis in the MBA program at the Wallace E. Carroll School of Management.
Dr. Porter has published articles in The Journal of Business Finance and Accounting, Research in Accounting Regulation and The Journal of Financial Research. At NERA, Dr. Porter has authored Fussing and Fuming about Fair Value and Financial Institutions Fact or Fiction?, Backdating Options: Frequently Asked Accounting Questions, and co-authored Options Backdating: Accounting, Tax, and Economics and The Subprime Meltdown: Understanding Accounting-Related Allegations.
Prior to joining NERA in 2003, Dr. Porter was a member of the Research and Technical Activities Staff at the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), where he worked on main agenda projects and for the Emerging Issues Task Force (EITF). Dr. Porter was the project manager for Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 143, Accounting for Asset Retirement Obligations. Dr. Porter has previously held academic positions at Boston College and Georgia State University and has auditing experience working at national and local CPA firms.
Dr. Porter received his PhD in accounting from the University of Washington; his dissertation examined the accounting choices made by airlines before and after deregulation of their industry in 1978. He earned his MBA from the Georgia Institute of Technology and his BS in accounting and finance from the University of Maryland.
