Joey A. Jacobs Chair of Excellence in Accounting

Jarett (Jerry) Decker is the Jacobs Chair of Excellence in Accounting and Professor of Practice at MTSU. He is the former Head of the World Bank’s Centre for Financial Reporting Reform in Vienna, Austria, where he led a multinational team of experts advising governments in developing and transitional economies on improvements in corporate accounting and financial transparency, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Before the World Bank, Decker was the first person to serve as Deputy Director and Chief Trial Counsel for the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB)—the accounting watchdog created in response to the Enron and WorldCom scandals—where he established and led the program of disciplinary litigation against Big Four and other auditors for the first eight years of the program’s existence.  He has also served as Senior Trial Counsel for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).  

Decker has published articles in The New York Times, Reason magazine, The National Interest, and Regulation Asia, among other venues. Decker speaks Russian, studied at the Pushkin Institute in Moscow, and has worked and written on problems of economic reform and rule of law in the former Soviet space.  A graduate of the College of William & Mary and the University of Michigan Law School, Decker is a licensed attorney (District of Columbia), a CPA (Illinois), and a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (ACAMS).

Jennings A. Jones College of Business holds two accreditations from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business — AACSB International. In 2016, the college’s Business and Accounting programs received reaffirmation of their AACSB accreditations. Only 189 collegiate business schools out of approximately 13,500 worldwide have AACSB accreditation for both Business and Accounting.