Monthly Archives: January 2020

Executive Summary

As part of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s (PCAOB) strategic goal of enhancing transparency and accessibility, we are committed to engaging more directly and more often with public company audit committees. In 2019, we had conversations with the audit committee chairs of almost all of the U.S. issuers whose audits we inspected and offered them the opportunity to speak with our inspections teams. Once our 2019 inspections are complete, we expect to have spoken with nearly 400 audit committee chairs. By contrast, historically, we have reached out to a small percentage of audit committee chairs during our inspections process. In 2018, for example, we spoke with 88 audit committee chairs.

We view an engaged and informed audit committee as an effective force multiplier in promoting audit quality and were grateful for the opportunity to speak with so many audit committee chairs. Continuous dialogue with audit committees on areas of mutual importance helps us to advance our mission and may assist audit committees in fulfilling their duties. To that end, our conversations focused broadly on audit quality, with specific discussions around such topics as audit committee perspectives of the auditor, new auditing and accounting standards, and technology and innovation.

Audit committee chairs provided informative and valuable feedback on these topics and were appreciative of the opportunity to engage directly with the PCAOB. They expressed particular interest in learning more about the PCAOB’s inspections process. Audit committee chairs also often asked for additional tools, resources, and learning opportunities from the PCAOB, and many were interested in learning about what we heard from their peers during these calls.

To that end, in this post we share:

• What we frequently heard from audit committee chairs and perspectives from them on what is working well to help improve audit quality;
• An overview of our inspections process; and
• Staff responses to frequently asked questions (FAQs) during the conversations.

Please note that the PCAOB does not require or necessarily endorse what we heard from audit committee chairs, but we share their perspectives in an effort to provide transparency into the process and as part of the reporting out of what we heard.

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