PG&E Corporation and its utility unit, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, announced the election of two new officers and new assignments for key team members within the companies’ finance and risk organizations.

PG&E Corporation and Pacific Gas and Electric Company named Anil Suri as vice president and chief risk and audit officer. Suri will have primary responsibility for enterprise risk management, market and credit risk, and corporate security. Suri will also serve as the companies’ chief audit officer. Suri has spent more than a decade in the field of risk management and has extensive experience in the energy sector. In addition to founding a risk-management consulting practice, he held positions at Wells Fargo and Ferrell Capital Management.

Stephen Cairns, currently PG&E Corporation vice president and controller, was named vice president internal audit and compliance. He will be responsible for internal auditing, compliance and ethics, and Sarbanes-Oxley oversight. Cairns joined PG&E Corporation in 2006 as senior director, internal auditing. Previously, he held positions with ScottishPower and Ernst & Young.

Dinyar Mistry, currently vice president and chief risk and audit officer, was named vice president and controller of PG&E Corporation and Pacific Gas and Electric Company. Mistry will assume responsibility for leading the companies’ accounting functions, including overseeing SEC reporting, operations and transactional accounting, tax, payroll, accounts payable, and general ledger responsibilities. Mistry joined Pacific Gas and Electric Company in 1994. Prior to his current role, he served as vice president and controller of the utility and vice president of regulation and rates. Before joining the utility, Mistry was a senior manager with KPMG.

In addition, Sara Cherry has been named vice president of finance and CFO of Pacific Gas and Electric Company. Cherry, currently senior director of internal auditing, will be responsible for all aspects of the utility’s financial planning and budgeting functions. Cherry’s appointment follows the departure of Barbara Barcon, who is leaving PG&E. Cherry joined PG&E Corporation in 2001 and has held positions of increasing responsibility in the finance and risk organizations at both PG&E Corporation and Pacific Gas and Electric Company. Previously, Cherry held positions at Deloitte & Touche, Pacific Bell, and Gap.

PricewaterhouseCoopers has hired Edward Gibson, the former chief security adviser for Microsoft LTD in the United Kingdom, as a director in PwC’s U.S. Forensics Technology Solutions practice. In this role, he will focus on helping organizations with issues involving investigating economic espionage, complex money laundering, cyber fraud schemes, and intellectual property theft.

While serving as Microsoft’s chief cyber security adviser in the U.K., Gibson was the chief spokesperson and point of contact for Microsoft Ltd U.K. on all matters of cyber security and IT infrastructure risk management for global businesses based in the U.K., government, law enforcement and security services, press. and consumers.

From February, 2000 through June 2005, Gibson was assigned to the American Embassy in London as an FBI Assistant Legal Attache primarily responsible for all FBI Internet investigations in the U.K. and Ireland. Previously, from 1985 through 2000, Gibson served as an FBI special agent, where he specialized in complex investigations involving money laundering, white collar fraud, asset identification and forfeiture, economic espionage, public corruption, and intellectual property theft.

Prior to the FBI, Gibson was a lawyer for a multinational corporation based in Michigan. He is also a qualified Solicitor in England and Wales, and was a special assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia and District of Columbia.

$14.5 billion Office Depot has appointed Thomas Colligan to its board of directors. He will also serve on the audit committee.

Since September 2007, Colligan has been vice dean of the Wharton School’s Aresty Institute of Executive Education. Previously, he spent more than 40 years with PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he served in several capacities, including partner, and most recently as vice chairman of PwC from 2001 to 2004.

Stephen Chipman has been named CEO of Grant Thornton, effective as of Jan. 1. He succeeds Edward Nusbaum, who will assume the responsibilities as CEO of Grant Thornton International.

Chipman, who was elected to the position in June 2009, most recently served as CEO of Greater China Management Corporation, responsible for leading the development and growth of services for Grant Thornton in China. Under Chipman’s leadership over the last two years, Grant Thornton’s resources in China have expanded significantly to more than 1,600 people in six offices.

A member of Grant Thornton for 28 years, Chipman has held a number of key executive leadership positions. He served as the U.S. Central Region managing partner from 2003 to 2006, delivering the most improved growth and profitability of any region in the firm during that period. Chipman served as the managing partner of the Dallas office from 2000 to 2003 and as the U.S. managing partner of Global Services and worldwide director of International Business Centers from 1998 to 2000. During that time, he developed the strategy and business plan for the launch of the global organization’s International Business Center network and served on the Grant Thornton International Board of Governors and the U.S. National Leadership Team and Partnership Board.

During the past six years as a member of the Grant Thornton Senior Leadership Team, Stephen served as the inaugural chair of the Grant Thornton Experience Leadership Council, and as chair of both the Global and China initiatives. Stephen began his work on international affairs in Hong Kong in 1992 as the regional technical director for Asia Pacific, and started his career with Grant Thornton in 1986 in Plymouth, England.

Cees Klumper, a former partner with KPMG Business Advisory Services in the Netherlands and an occasional guest columnist for Compliance Week, has announced he has left the firm to join the GAVI Alliance as its head of internal audit.

GAVI is a global health partnership whose members work together to save lives by increasing access to vaccines in 70 of the poorest countries around the world.

Klumper will be based at GAVI’s headquarters in Geneva.

Peter Brady has joined accounting firm RSM McGladrey as a managing director and leader of the firm’s risk-management practice in New York.

An accomplished senior executive, Brady has over 21 years of experience in risk management, internal audit, and internal controls. Prior to joining McGladrey, he held several leadership positions with Ernst & Young. As a U.K. partner, he led the development of risk practices in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa regions. In 2002, he moved to the United States to lead the Big Four firm’s Global Center for risk and for the past three years worked in the Financial Services Office in New York.

Brady’s clients have ranged from entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 companies and operate in the financial services, energy, telecommunications entertainment, and retail and consumer products sectors. He focuses on solving complex business issues by working closely with senior management to generate ideas, initiate change, build consensus, and resolve mission-critical problems with scalable, practical solutions.

David Shapiro has rejoined PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Washington National Tax Services practice as a principal in its International Tax Services group, in Washington, D.C., the firm announced. Shapiro, who has broad expertise in both international tax planning and the taxation of financial transactions, was formerly an ITS principal in the practice from 2005 to 2007.

Most recently, Shapiro served in the Office of Tax Policy at the United States Treasury. While at the Treasury, he was primarily responsible for tax issues and published guidance related to domestic and cross-border financial products and transactions. Shapiro was also heavily involved in developing tax policy, guidance and legislation surrounding the government’s response to the liquidity crisis.

Shapiro is an adjunct professor of law in Georgetown University’s LL.M. Program in Taxation, where he teaches a course on international tax. He actively participates on the financial transaction tax committees of the American Bar Association and the D.C. Bar Association, most recently serving as chairman of the D.C Bar committee before resigning upon his appointment to the Treasury.

Accounting, auditing and tax consulting firm Haskell & White has announced six promotions from within the organization.

They are:

• Jon Huckabay has been promoted to senior manager in the firm’s tax department. He joined the firm in January 2008 after five years with BDO Seidman.

• Paul Louis has been promoted to senior manager in the audit and business advisory services department. Paul came to the firm after several years with Ernst & Young.

• Jenny Lee has been promoted to manager within the firm’s tax department.  She joined Haskell & White after several years with local firm Kelly & Co.

• Christina Kuno and Ryan Lewis have been promoted to audit seniors in the audit and business advisory services department.

• Jorge Sandoval has been promoted to tax senior accountant.

Accounting firm Grant Thornton announced the promotion of Jason Gitstein as executive director, effective as of Aug. 1.

In his role as executive director, he will be responsible for administrative oversight of the firm’s development, monitoring, and enforcement of independence quality control policies, tools, databases, and other requirements to facilitate compliance with the PCAOB and SEC’s independence quality control standards.

A 10-year veteran of the firm, Gitstein has served as senior manager, and director of independence and ethics compliance. Prior to joining Grant Thornton, he served as a technical manager in the area of professional ethics for the AICPA.

Mark Olson, chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, will leave the Board effective July 31, ending a tumultuous three-year term where he played a key role in amending compliance obligations for Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Olson has been chairman of the PCAOB since July 1, 2006, when he was appointed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Prior to his work on the PCAOB, he served on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.

In regard to his resignation, Olson said, “the decision is entirely personal and reflects my desire at this time of life to establish new priorities.” He also indicated that he does not plan to serve in a consulting capacity to the PCAOB, but will continue with his work to promote financial literacy.

Olson’s most notable achievement while chairman was to deliver Auditing Standard No. 5, a relaxed set of guidelines for auditors to use while inspecting companies’ internal controls over financial reporting as required by Section 404. The Board had originally set out an exacting burden in Auditing Standard No. 2, which led to howls of protests by corporations that auditors were unnecessarily meticulous in their 404 audits. After much protest and study by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the PCAOB, the Board finally published AS5 in 2007 to help relieve compliance costs.

Olson’s departure also leaves the PCAOB leaderless at a critical time: the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case challenging the PCAOB as unconstitutional. The improbable case has worked its way through the court system for two years, and now will appear before the high court sometime this fall. The justices are likely to render a decision next spring, and if they rule in favor of the plaintiffs, the very existence of the PCAOB and the SOX compliance regime generally will be jeopardized.