The European Commission has finally allowed national audit oversight bodies to share intelligence with their U.S. counterparts, but only on a trial basis.
The Commission shut U.S. audit regulators out of a deal reached with other countries last September because they wouldn’t agree to share their working papers in return.
In the European Union, audit firms are regulated by the oversight body in their home nation; regulators in the other nations where the firm does business rely on the quality of that supervision. They only ask for working paper access in “exceptional cases,” the Commission said.
The U.S. still doesn’t support that approach, the Commission said in a statement explaining its change of heart,...