Currently, Dr. Bailey is a Senior Policy Advisor to the National Policy and Strategy Group-Institutional Acceptance, at Grant Thornton LLP. He lives and works in Cottonwood, Arizona.

In January of 2004, Dr. Andrew Bailey was appointed Deputy Chief Accountant at the Securities and Exchange Commission. In this position he was responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Office of the Chief Accountant, including resolution of accounting and auditing issues, rulemaking projects, and oversight of private sector standard-setting efforts and regulation of auditors. He worked closely with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board on all auditing-related matters.

While at the University of Illinois, Dr. Bailey was the Ernst & Young Distinguished Professor of Accounting. Previously he was director of the Center for International Education and Research in Accounting and editor of The International Journal of Accounting. Additionally, he was head of the Department of Accountancy, University of Illinois, from Autumn 1994 to Summer 1997.

Professor Bailey earned two degrees at the University of Minnesota, B.S.B. and M.S. in accounting, before earning his Ph.D. in accounting at the Ohio State University in 1971. Earlier, he was the Deloitte & Touche Professor of Accounting and head of the Department of Accounting at the University of Arizona. He was also a faculty member at the Universities of Maine, Minnesota (Department Chair), Iowa, Purdue, and the Ohio State University (Arthur Young Professor of Accounting).

Professor Bailey was a Visiting Professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, the Otago University in New Zealand, the Norwegian Graduate School of Management in Oslo, Norway, and Groupe Ècole Superieure de Commerce de Paris in Paris, France. He is a past president of the American Accounting Association and past chairman of the Auditing section of the AAA.