Accounting firms have suddenly found themselves fighting on two fronts to shield sensitive criticism of their work from public view—scrambling to fix their operations to please federal regulators, even as state regulators have begun asking for private information in those federal oversight reports.
The Big 4 firms have been making numerous changes to their quality control processes in response to inspections by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, according to the PCAOB. In a report published last week, the PCAOB documented steps the Big 4 firms have taken to answer the Board’s concerns from its first round of limited inspections, protecting the firms from any future public disclosure by the PCAOB (see box at right).
