Speaker Biographies

Alan Anderson is senior vice president of global project management and strategy for Franklin Templeton Investments in San Mateo, California. He was formerly senior vice president of member and public interest at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

Christopher Cox is the twenty-eighth chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He was appointed by President George W. Bush on June 2, 2005, unanimously confirmed by the Senate on July 29, 2005, and sworn in on August 3, 2005. Mr. Cox served for over ten years in the majority leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives, from 1994 until 2005. During his tenure he served as chairman of the House Policy Committee, chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, chairman of the Select Committee on U.S. National Security, chairman of the Select Committee on Homeland Security (the predecessor to the permanent House Committee), chairman of the Task Force on Capital Markets, and chairman of the Task Force on Budget Process Reform. In addition, he served in a leadership capacity as a senior member of every committee with jurisdiction over investor protection and U.S. capital markets, including the House Energy and Commerce Committee (as vice chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee), the Financial Services Committee, the Government Reform Committee (as vice chairman of the full committee), the Joint Economic Committee, and the Budget Committee. Mr. Cox also served as cochairman of the bipartisan Study Group on Enhancing Multilateral Export Controls, which published a unanimous report in 2001. In 1994, he was appointed by President Clinton to the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform, which published its unanimous report in 1995. From 1986 until 1988, Mr. Cox served in the White House as senior associate counsel to the president. In that capacity, he advised the president on a wide range of matters, including the nomination of three U.S. Supreme Court justices, reform of the federal budget process, and the 1987 stock market crash. From 1978 to 1986, he specialized in venture capital and corporate finance with the international law firm of Latham & Watkins, where he was the partner in charge of the corporate department in Orange County and a member of the firm's national management. In 1982–83, Mr. Cox took a leave of absence from Latham & Watkins to teach federal income tax at Harvard Business School. He also cofounded Context Corporation, publisher of the English translation of the Soviet Union's daily newspaper, Pravda. In 1977–78, he was law clerk to U.S. Court of Appeals judge Herbert Choy.

Richard J. Daly is group president, executive committee member, and corporate officer of Automatic Data Processing Inc. (ADP). Before joining ADP in 1989, Mr. Daly worked with Thomson McKinnon Securities as senior vice president of operations and a member of the board of directors. Prior to working at Thomson, he spent seven years at the Independent Election Corporation of America in various senior management positions, including senior vice president and chief operating officer. He also worked for Arthur Andersen & Co. and Touche Ross & Co. as a certified public accountant.

Robert Eccles is a founder and managing director of Perception Partners, Inc., which is focused on helping its clients create value by providing insights and knowledge on corporate governance, risk management, and greater transparency of corporate reporting. In doing so, it integrates a wide variety of unique databases, as well as leading but proven technologies as part of an overall change management process. Prior to founding Perception Partners, Mr. Eccles was a tenured professor at the Harvard Business School, where he was on the faculty for fourteen years. While there, he served as the chairman of the Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management Area. He is the author of many publications, including two books on corporate reporting: The ValueReporting Revolution: Moving Beyond The Earnings Game (Wiley, 2001), coauthored with Robert H. Herz, E. Mary Keegan, and David M.H. Phillips, and Building Public Trust: The Future of Corporate Reporting (Wiley, 2002) coauthored with Samuel A. DiPiazza.

James K. Glassman is a resident fellow at AEI, where he specializes in issues involving economics and financial markets. In addition, he is host and cofounder of TechCentralStation.com, a website that concentrates on matters of technology and public policy. In September 2004, Mr. Glassman launched a new organization, Investors Action, for which he serves as chairman. Investors Action aims to educate America’s 90 million investors and represent their interests in the public-policy arena. Mr. Glassman also writes a weekly op-ed column on economic and political topics for the Scripps Howard News Service, and a monthly column on investing for Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. His most recent book, The Secret Code of the Superior Investor (Crown, 2002) was named one of the top ten investing books of 2002 by Barron’s. Between July 1993 and July 2004, Mr. Glassman wrote an internationally syndicated weekly column on investing for the Washington Post. From 1987 to 1993, he was editor and part-owner of Roll Call, the twice-weekly newspaper that covers Congress. Prior to that, he had a long career in magazine publishing—as president of the Atlantic Monthly, executive vice president of U.S. News & World Report, and publisher of The New Republic. In 1972, he started Figaro, a New Orleans weekly newspaper, which he sold in 1979. He served as executive editor of Washingtonian magazine from 1979 to 1981.

John Philip is currently in the senior manager–technical accounting group at Infosys Technologies Limited, a NASDAQ-listed, India-based technology services firm. He is responsible for ensuring that the firm’s accounting transactions are in compliance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), and preparing U.S. GAAP financial and related filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Mr. Philip also coordinated Infosys’s participation in the XBRL SEC Voluntary Filing Program. Before joining Infosys in 2002, he worked for KPMG in India for more than six years. He has authored several articles in Indian newspapers on accounting and corporate governance.

Mark Schnitzer is an executive director at Morgan Stanley, where he is responsible for managing data strategies for the ModelWare business. He has served in several leadership positions with XBRL International and XBRL-US since 1999. Mr. Schnitzer was the founder and president of FreeEDGAR, which he sold to EDGAR Online in 1998. He was a distressed securities analyst at Dabney/Resnick and Wagner and an investment banker at Bear Stearns prior to founding FreeEDGAR.

Louis M. Thompson is president and chief executive officer of the National Investor Relations Institute (NIRI) and is an internationally recognized expert on corporate disclosure, governance, and other corporate strategic management topics. Prior to joining NIRI, Mr. Thompson was assistant White House press secretary to President Gerald R. Ford. He held a variety of key public affairs positions for the U.S. command in Vietnam and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and was an assistant to the president of AEI. He began his career as a news anchor for WOI-TV and radio in Iowa. Mr. Thompson has also served in advisory capacities to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and is serving a second term on the New York Stock Exchange Individual Investor Advisory Committee. He was a member of the Harvard University New Foundations Working Group on corporate governance and recently served on the board of directors for the National Council for Economic Education. He is chairman of the advisory council for the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communications at Iowa State University.

Peter J. Wallison joined AEI in January 1999 as a resident fellow and as co-director of AEI’s program on financial market deregulation. He previously practiced banking, corporate, and financial law at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington, D.C., and New York. From June 1981 to January 1985, Mr. Wallison was general counsel of the United States Treasury Department, where he had a significant role in the development of the Reagan administration's proposals for deregulation in the financial services industry. He also served as general counsel to the Depository Institutions Deregulation Committee and participated in the Treasury Department's efforts to deal with the debt held by less developed countries. During 1986 and 1987, Mr. Wallison was White House counsel to President Ronald Reagan. Between 1972 and 1976, Mr. Wallison served first as special assistant to Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and, subsequently, as counsel to Mr. Rockefeller when he was vice president of the United States.

Mike Willis has more than twenty-five years of accounting experience and is a partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers. He served as the founding chairman of XBRL International, which is currently composed of more than 450 leading software, accounting, and finance companies from twenty-six countries around the world. Mr. Willis has also held a number of positions within the XBRL community and currently serves on the International Steering Committee and the U.S. Jurisdictional Steering Committee. In addition, he serves on the Enhanced Business Reporting Consortium, a market-based consortium formed to facilitate development of international business reporting standards. Mr. Willis speaks frequently, publishes papers on the topic of business reporting, and has been interviewed about a more efficient business reporting supply chain by a range of business periodicals, including the Financial Times, Business Week, Wall Street & Technology, CFO Magazine, and CIO Magazine.

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