Lately, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board hasn’t lived up to the lofty goals in its mission statement.
The PCAOB was forged by Congress in the aftermath of the accounting and auditing failures of the early 2000s to restore investor confidence in financial reporting. But the regulator severely bruised its own reputation in the last two years. In 2018, PCAOB employees jumped to auditing firm KPMG and supplied KPMG’s management with confidential information about KPMG audits that the PCAOB intended to inspect. In 2019, it emerged that two former PCAOB board members had been meeting privately with KPMG’s partner in charge of audit quality while the firm was under PCAOB scrutiny for audit quality problems.
