CHAMPAIGN – Could you give a 12-minute presentation on whether a fictional country should stick with U.S. accounting standards or switch to international standards?

Would it be any easier if you were offered $10,000 for your efforts?

A team of University of Illinois accounting students took the challenge and won $10,000 as one of five finalists in an "extreme accounting" competition sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The national finals of the "xACT Challenge," held Jan. 17-18 in New York, completed weeks of competition in which 354 teams from 43 colleges and universities took part.

Based on videotaped presentations at the campus level, five teams advanced to the finals. Those teams were from the UI, Louisiana State University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Texas and Wake Forest University.

Each team received $10,000 and an all-expense-paid trip to the finals.

David Light, a member of the UI's team, said team members split the winnings equally. He said he had no big plans for his share.

"I'll spend a little bit and save the rest. I have nothing too exciting planned," he said. But Light said he did use his $250 prize for winning the campus competition in November to help finance a trip to the Rose Bowl.

During the two-day trip to New York, Light and teammates Daniel Wenhold, Jared Marchiando and Catherine Lien were treated to dinner and the Broadway show "Curtains."

On the second day, they went before a panel of judges to explain how they would address the case they were given in November.

"They gave us the case of a fictional country and its dilemma of whether to stay with U.S. reporting standards or switch to an international model," Light said. "We had to analyze the country and identify whether they should switch. We decided they should. Then we had to come up with a method for switching and outline what the real benefits would be."

They had 12 minutes for the presentation, followed by a 15-minute question-and-answer session with the judges.

As it turned out, the team from Berkeley won the competition. But Light said the outcome was better than last year, when the UI team won honorable mention for content in the national competition, but just missed being invited to New York.

"That was hard to take," he said.

That's why he and Wenhold, both juniors, decided to compete again this year, along with three new teammates – sophomores Marchiando and Lien and junior Beth Rahn, who couldn't join the team in New York because she's studying abroad this semester. Their adviser was John Hedeman, assistant dean for the UI College of Business.

Light doubts he will go back to the competition next year.

"Right now, Dan and I told them we're probably retired from this," he said. But he added that Marchiando and Lien will likely be back.

In the competition, the fictional country was described as near the Mediterranean Sea and demographically identical to the United States except in size.

Light said he thinks the question was a thinly veiled attempt to get students to debate whether the U.S. should change its accounting standards. Currently, U.S. standards are rule-based, while international stand-ards are principle-based.

International standards, he said, give companies "more freedom to disclose what they want to disclose."

And why did the UI team argued for switching to international standards?

"I think that's the long-term trend in the financial reporting world," Light said.