Three UMSL accounting students have been awarded $15,000 scholarships from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board: (from left) Donnie Henderson, Taofeeqat Shittu and Autumn Starnes. (Photo by Derik Holtmann)

The funding for the annual Public Company Accounting Oversight Board scholarships comes from a unique source – monetary penalties collected by the PCAOB from companies that have violated guidelines set up by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

For the 2025-26 academic year, the scholarships are worth $15,000 each. For the second year in a row, three accounting students from the University of Missouri–St. Louis have been selected to receive the scholarships – Donnie Henderson, Taofeeqat Shittu and Autumn Starnes.

The total number of scholarships for 2025 has not been announced yet, but the number has risen dramatically in recent years – from 250 in 2022 to 369 in 2023 and 676 in 2024. For the 2024-25 school year, the scholarship amount was raised from $10,000 per student up to $15,000. More than $10 million in scholarships were given out last year alone, raising the total through that year to $32.56 million since the program’s inception in 2011.

The significance of the high amount of this scholarship is not lost on the recipients.

“When you think about scholarships, you think maybe $1,000 or $2,000 or maybe even $500, and those are great,” Henderson said. “With college life and the whole college experience, scholarships play such a huge role in how people can approach their education. When you get offered something like this, you just immediately realize now you don’t have to worry about certain things, or how are you going to pay for this or that next month, or if you’re going to have to ask your mom and dad for help. Now, I can just actually focus on my academics. Not to say that I wasn’t focused before, but that was always in the back of my mind.”

To be eligible for the scholarship, students must also have a GPA of 3.3 or higher, demonstrate financial need and demonstrate high ethical standards. Another significant element: Students cannot apply on their own. They must first be nominated by a faculty member of a PCAOB-approved university’s accounting program. For the 2025-26 school year, that list includes 486 institutions, up from 463 last year and 336 the year before. Assistant Professor Steve Moehrle officially submits the nominations for UMSL, after conversations with his fellow accounting faculty members.

Learn more about the three scholarship recipients below.

Donnie Henderson

Donnie Henderson is quick to credit those around him for helping him find his academic home in UMSL’s Accounting Department. For example: His mom, Cynthia Gill, is an UMSL alum and retired University City police officer who encouraged him to consider her alma mater.

And when Henderson enrolled at St. Louis Community College–Florissant Valley after graduating from Pattonville High School, the impact and influence of Accounting Professor Elida Kraja was undeniable. He enrolled in Kraja’s applied accounting class, and Henderson found himself drawn to accounting through her instruction style. So he followed up with her financial accounting class, and that’s when Kraja mentioned UMSL as a potential next step for Henderson and other students interested in accounting as a career.

The trust built up over the two classes was good enough for Henderson. He started at UMSL in the fall semester of 2024 as part of the Accelerated Master’s program. Here, he’s found professors who care, much like he experienced with Kraja.

“When you have people around you want to see you succeed – genuinely nice, good-hearted people like Dr. Moehrle or Dr. Kraja at Flo Valley – they really help spark something,” Henderson said. “If it wasn’t for them, I don’t know exactly what would be going on. Dr. Kraja, she was a great professor. She made it really interesting, really interactive. She made everything make sense. She really just ignited my interest, so I was like, ‘OK, maybe I should just go ahead and check out accounting. I want to take this a step further.’ And then at UMSL, I took Dr. Moehrle’s class. He does the exact same thing. Those two, they’re a huge reason I am where I am.”

Once Henderson decided on UMSL – he had toured the campus, along with several others in the St. Louis region, during a program after his eighth-grade year – he was determined to make the most of the experience.

“I made that one of my goals when I transferred, to get involved and join some organizations and go to meetings and events here on campus because that wasn’t available at the junior college,” Henderson said. “So I looked at NABA, because that’s right up my alley, and also with the Accounting Club, because I was really interested in that. And then my first semester here, I went to Chicago with the Accounting Club for a regional conference. That made a really good impression, made for a good first semester at UMSL.”

At another conference – Discover EY in Atlanta – Henderson was able to meet other accounting students from across the country and make the contacts that led to an EY internship that he has lined up for next summer. It’s an internship that allows students to get experience in both audit accounting and tax accounting as they choose their career paths.

Landing the EY internship helped Henderson confirm his choice to pursue accounting. Same thing with the PCAOB scholarship.

“This is an honor, and it’s cool because sometimes – and I think this is just a human thing – you tend to just undermine your abilities, like, ‘I’m doing OK,’ but you’re just thinking about everybody else and comparing yourself to them,” Henderson said. “But when you have a moment where somebody actually notices you, sees something in you that you maybe don’t see in yourself, they’re kind of telling you about yourself in a good way. It feels great.”

Taofeeqat Shittu

One of the things Taofeeqat Shittu appreciates most about the accounting department at UMSL is the willingness of faculty members to answer questions and offer instruction outside of classroom time. For her, that’s an essential part of the learning process.

“I’m always the student that is going to go back to the instructor to check my exam results,” she said with a laugh. “Like, if I get one question wrong, I need to know why. I’m like, ‘I’m so sorry, but we need to figure this out. I need to know so I can fix it next time.’ So I’m quite popular with the professors.”

She wasn’t always like that with her academics. In her first few years of high school, she was a good student, but she wasn’t too concerned about the difference between an A and a B. She admits that was partially a fear of failure, because if she didn’t get an A, at least she could say it was because she hadn’t tried her hardest. But in her final year of high school, she decided to shift that mentality and see what she was capable of when she gave it her all. She’s never looked back.

Shittu moved from Lagos, Nigeria, to the St. Louis area with her two sisters, Tinu and Kyra, seven years ago. She not only knew she’d attend college in the United States, but she knew she would pursue something in the business area.

“Back home, you need to decide what you want to do at the end of Grade 9,” she said. “Because in Grade 10, they split you into art, science and business. So right from Grade 9 I knew I was going the business route. The question was, am I doing accounting? Economics? Finance? Those were the questions I had, but I knew for sure I was already in business space.”

Shittu earned her associate degree from St. Louis Community College–Florissant Valley, then started at UMSL in January 2024. Knowing she would need to reach the requirement of 150 hours to sit for the CPA exam, UMSL’s Accelerated Master’s program was a perfect fit. Shittu is on track to earn her bachelor’s this December and her master’s in December 2026. While she’s studying at UMSL, Shittu is getting on-the-job training as an accountant at Addeen Company in Florissant.

A year-and-a-half into her UMSL experience, Shittu is excited for what the rest of her time at the university will bring. She’s been active in Beta Alpha Psi and is hoping to take on a leadership role with the group this year. She also has two tax-focused internships lined up: at UHY this winter and then PwC in the summer of 2026.

“Tax is just really interesting to me, knowing the rules and the laws to follow,” she said. “I’m really looking forward to those two internships.”

The financial aspect of the PCAOB scholarship is important, of course, but Shittu said the honor of being nominated meant a lot, too.

“All that came to my mind was ‘People are watching my work,’” she said. “I needed to get nominated for it first. There are many of us in the school, it’s just crazy. It feels good when your hard work is seen. I try to be a high achiever, personally, so for someone else to see that, I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s good.’”

Autumn Starnes

Autumn Starnes has been busy since starting her UMSL experience in the fall of 2021. When she graduates in May, she will have dual degrees – a BS in Accounting and a BSBA with an emphasis in Information Systems. And she will have finished her Undergraduate Certificate in Cybersecurity, too.

“I wasn’t planning on doing two degrees,” she said, “but when I switched to accounting, I went to an advisor and she said, ‘Let me check your degree audit to see how many classes it would take to get this information systems degree, too.’ And it was only a semester or so more. So it did extend my graduation date, but I think it will be helpful for later, allowing me to shift more toward IT or shift more toward accounting as my career progresses.”

Starnes grew up in Lebanon, Missouri, but when her grandfather passed away, Starnes and her mother, Kimberly Carter, moved up to the St. Louis area to help take care of her grandmother. A first-generation college student, Starnes had earned her associate degree from Ozark Technical College and started comparing schools in the St. Louis region for the next step in her education.

“I grew up with a single mom on welfare,” she said. “Money was tight, so I had to find something that was affordable but also with solid educational value. As I was looking around, UMSL seemed the most welcoming to low-income students, like they care and want to help you get through it.”

At OTC, Starnes was initially leaning toward a career in medicine, taking chemistry classes and doing a pre-pharmacy degree. She liked the classes but began to explore other career options that would potentially involve fewer loans and less student debt after graduation. She enrolled at UMSL intending to pursue a cybersecurity degree, and she even competed in the Midwest Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition through the UMSL Cybersecurity Club.

But the accounting classes she took as part of the cybersecurity program resonated with her, and as she started to realize the wide variety of potential career paths with an accounting degree, she made the switch. Starnes is doing an IT audit internship at EY this summer and has another internship lined up with Wipfli starting in January.

“With the internship at EY, it involves looking at a lot of IT controls and security controls to make sure that the companies are doing what they’re supposed to be doing, that the controls are doing what they’re supposed to be doing, and that there’s nothing shady in the code trying to launder money or something,” she said.

Starnes quickly noticed the similarity to what she’s doing at EY and how the PCAOB gets money for these scholarships. Being nominated by the faculty members at UMSL was an honor, she said, and being awarded the scholarship is a huge help.

“It definitely means a lot going into my final year,” she said. “I had scholarships, though not for nearly as much, that helped me pay for the tuition previously, but going into my final year I didn’t have those anymore because it was at the end of the qualification period. So I was very worried about how I was going to afford to pay for everything. I was thinking, ‘OK, I’m going to have to take out loans and just deal with it, then pay for it later.’ So having this now, I know I’m not going to have to worry about having exponentially more debt once I graduate, and I’ll be able to start off on a good foot and not stress as much about the money.”