Charl de Villiers: accounting for impact

When the New Zealand government tried to contact Professor Charl de Villiers to ask whether he would accept appointment as a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, the good news took a while to get through.

An email bounced. Then a phone call from an unknown number while he was in Italy on a research trip was ignored.

“I just thought it was a telemarketer or something,” he says. “If it’s important enough, they’ll phone again.”

Phone again they did, when the professor of accounting was back in the Business School. This time he answered and finally received a question he “would never consider saying no to”: will you accept the honour of being named a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit?

“I said ‘that’s amazing, thank you and of course!’ ‘I wonder why the email didn’t come through.’”

Charl assumed the problem was his name.

“They said, ‘No, the spelling of your name is correct… but, ah, we’ve spelt Auckland incorrectly.’ That made me chuckle.”

Charl was named a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2026 New Year Honours for services to accountancy.

The recognition honours a career that’s helped shape corporate accountability and sustainability reporting, guiding organisations and governments to adopt and require more rigorous reporting practices.

“The award made me think about how lucky I am to do this job where there’s so much choice and so many wonderful people.”

Charl’s path to academia began in an unlikely place: mandatory military service in apartheid-era South Africa.

After earning an accounting degree from the University of Stellenbosch and completing three years of auditing to qualify as a chartered accountant, he had to serve two years in the South African military during the turbulent mid-1980s.

“I felt like it was a total waste of time,” he says.

“They teach you how to march, and how to obey orders and not think for yourself. I spent around nine months like that, running around, carrying tree stumps, building fitness and learning a little bit along the way, but, you know, we all just thought of it as a total waste of time.”

Things changed when Charl was posted to the military academy and asked to teach accounting.

“I loved it,” he says. “I felt I could explain things to people in a simple way, without using big words or making it complicated.”

Until then, he had assumed his future lay in business.

‘About this research thing’

Born in 1962, Charl grew up on a small farm just outside Cape Town. His father worked for the railways while running a modest chicken-and-egg business part time. His mother had trained as an accountant but, as was common at the time, left the workforce after marrying.

“I was brought up with a strong work ethic,” he says. “You’ve got to work hard and do the right thing by other people, and you must go to university.”

Cape Town as a kid in the 70s was fantastic, says Charl. “I had a bicycle and I went to visit my friends, riding kilometres and kilometres. I would take shortcuts through wooded areas and stuff like that. There was never a problem.”

At school though, he wasn’t particularly interested; “I mucked around a bit,” he recalls.

But in his final year he decided he wanted a career in business. “In order to do that, I thought I needed to become a chartered accountant, because many of the CEOs at the time were.”

Charl graduated from the University of Stellenbosch, and in his late 20s, got a job with a company as a financial manager reporting to the managing director.

“I thought I was a very important person; I was going to be a ‘captain of industry’!”

But, at 30, Charl was made redundant.

“I phoned the head of accounting where I studied at Stellenbosch and I said, ‘Do you have a job?’ And he said, ‘Can you start in January?’

“I was very lucky.”

Charl says Stellenbosch had a fantastic week-long induction program covering teaching, lesson planning, research and goal setting.

“And then I went into the department of accounting, and I said, ‘Right, about this research thing’. And everybody just looked at me. Nobody there did research in accounting at the time.”

Thankfully, Charl had a neighbour in the languages department who explained how academic research worked.

“He said, ‘Well, you do this research, and then you do a paper, and then you submit it to a conference, and then you go to the conference and present it.’

“And he said, ‘Last year, I went to the Netherlands to a conference, and I said, ‘Are you telling me the university paid for you to go to the Netherlands?’”

“I was sold.”

Within months, Charl had two papers accepted at international conferences.

His doctoral research focused on environmental accounting, an area that would grow rapidly over the following decades alongside his own influence in the field.

Charl went on to hold academic positions at several universities, including as a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin, before moving from Pretoria to Auckland in 2005 with his wife and two daughters.

“The level of violent crime in Pretoria had escalated; it was time to go.”

The family settled on the North Shore, and Charl gained experience at Auckland, Massey, AUT and Waikato Universities.

“I'd been publishing in local journals in South Africa, and when I came to New Zealand, I began to target better-quality international journals. I had lots of research experience, but I had to refine it to take that next step. And that was fantastic.”

Charl’s work has been recognised internationally. A Stanford University study ranked him among the top 50 accounting academics globally and in the top two percent of scientists worldwide.

He has been influential as editor of Meditari Accountancy Research, helping transform the journal into one of the leading publications in its field. He also launched the Meditari Conference, now held annually.

“I’ve really worked to expand the journal; it’s gone from about six papers to almost 100 a year now. And the conference helps researchers in the field get feedback on their papers and develop them further towards publication.”

Now, Charl’s focus is on fostering the next generation of researchers through his academic roles, including adjunct professorships at the University of Pretoria and the University of Cape Town.

His research continues to focus on the role accounting is playing, and could play, to benefit society and the natural environment.

He’s on the steering group of the Business School’s Centre for Inclusive Capitalism and is preparing a paper, and will serve as guest editor, for a special issue in one of the top accounting journals on how accounting can help make capitalism more inclusive.

“If you think about the idea of inclusive capitalism, it's that some groups in society don't feel particularly well served by the system of capitalism. And the question is: how can accounting help ameliorate that problem?

“At its core, accounting is about accountability,” he says. “It’s about giving an account to the people you are responsible to – providing information so society can make better decisions.”

– Sophie Boladeras