Dr. Thomas Schneider
On June 3, 2023, the Ted Rogers School community was saddened to learn of the sudden passing of our colleague and friend, Tom Schneider. He is dearly missed by his students, colleagues and friends, not only for his academic contributions to research and teaching, but for his friendship, collegiality and contributions to the life of the Ted Rogers School of Management. Learn more about Prof. Schneider’s life (external link, opens in new window) .
Overview
Thomas Schneider is an Associate Professor of Accounting at the Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. He is also a Chartered Professional Accountant (Canada) with extensive experience in management and consulting prior to entering into an academic career. Since entering academia, his research and teaching have focused on environmental accounting, particularly in the natural resource sector. Professor Schneider has published his research in such leading journals as Contemporary Accounting Research, Accounting Auditing and Accountability Journal and Sustainability Accounting Management and Policy Journal (SAMPJ), among others. He was recently awarded outstanding paper of the year for 2018 in SAMPJ, a journal that seeks to contribute to practical and policy solutions to improve the impact of organizations and societies on sustainable development. This research focus allows for an effective bridge to translate academic work into real world activities, a case in point being the recent co-authoring of a chapter on carbon accounting for a forthcoming handbook on social and environmental accounting. Further to this, Thomas is a member of the United Nations Expert Group on Resource Management and has worked to develop the guidelines on social and environmental considerations for the United Nations Framework Classification (UNFC) for resources. The UNFC is currently being further developed and adopted worldwide to aid in the classification and management of resources in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Ongoing research and applied work seeks to address concerns over the reporting of environmental liabilities under International Financial Reporting Standards. Fully transparent reporting would allow investors to make fully informed decisions. It would also help to keep the general public aware of the full extent of existing clean-up costs, as these costs can end up being passed on to the public. Thus, he is a strong advocate of the concept that companies have a responsibility to report to more than just their shareholders, including in their required financial and management disclosures. His research work is also expanding into the wider energy sector, such as hydro-power, to help to understand the context of what has occurred in the past. Even more so, this research is meant to inform decisions on managing the resource sector in a responsible way.
Thomas developed and teaches the Ethics in Accounting course at the Ted Rogers School of Management. The course goes beyond the usual (but important) teachings on accounting fraud, and expands the scope of accounting ethics into one in which addressing areas like climate change risk are key concerns of an ethical accountant.
Research Interests
Social and environmental accounting, natural resource accounting and resource valuation