And PCAOB chairman Jim Doty kept scheduling “public meetings” on the exhausted topic of mandatory auditor rotation – the last in Houston having dragged through October 18 with no observable contribution to our wisdom – until he held one in the junior high school gym in Punxsutawney itself.
A tour of media, commentators, and those knowledgeable, confirms the prevailing sense of lassitude and ennui – owing much to the nationwide American paralysis ahead of its November 6 elections, but also to the absence of any credible display of energy, much less urgency, around the issues overhanging the accounting profession.
The usual crabbing continues, of course – ranging from the ineffective if age-old grousing about auditor skepticism -- vented by the PCAOB chair himself, webinars from the private sector, and such bloggers as the Grumpy Old Accountants – to the commenter on my last posting, about the British regulator’s new policy on re-tendering, stating mistakenly that I “ask for ‘proof’ that lack of auditor rotation is a cause of fraud,” when I want no such impossible thing, but only recognition, as I have often said (see here) of the absence of “any evidence of a link between auditor tenure and audit quality.”
In the gathering gloom and darkness of late autumn, then:
Nothing good can be expected from the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, where Chairman Mary Schapiro is said to be packing for her post-election departure, having in her light-touch tenure realized nothing of effect on the structure or stability of the assurance function.
On the globalization of accounting standards, the dialog is if anything more sterile than ever: The SEC has only an interim chief accountant in place; the griping about non-convergence includes the hand-wringing of IASB trustee chairman Michel Prada and the sideline irrelevancies of AICPA president Barry Melancon; while FASB chair Leslie Seidman should be plainly tired of the censorious Dutch-uncle utterances of her counterpart at the IASB, chairman and non-accountant Hans Hoogervorst.
While on the auditing standards side, the intellectual heft brought by the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board to its project on Improving the Auditor’s Report is unmatched by the political skills or horse-power necessary for action in the face of entrenched resistance. At the same time, the PCAOB’s parallel Concept Release, going back to June 2011 – which by rights should be cooperative and complementary – wallows becalmed for lack of any readiness to re-engineer a reporting system in which all interested parties are invested in preserving the status quo.
Even what should be a bright spot – the launch earlier this month by seven joint sponsors of an assessment tool for audit committees, “Annual Evaluation of the External Auditor” – designed to support “an informed recommendation to the respective board of directors whether to retain the auditor,” has the taste of very thin gruel.
That is, it says precious little about the skill level of an audit committee, to think it requires such an anodyne checklist as these “get-to-‘yes’” examples:
- “Was the cost of the audit reasonable and sufficient for the size, complexity and risks of the company?”
- “Was the audit engagement partner able to explain accounting and auditing issues in an understandable manner?”
Enough with the softball treatment. For a committee obliged to justify itself, why are there not such substantial questions as:
- “What qualifications and training does the audit committee itself have in the exercise of skepticism and the avoidance of bias?"
- “If forced to rotate or re-tender the audit, does the company have a realistic alternative choice?”
- “What other or different forms of assurance, beyond the current standard audit report, would company management and its community of information users find useful and valuable?”
Historians of the evolution of knowledge teach that systems on the cusp of obsolescence – inherently resistant to the disruptions of fundamental change – evolve only when those contributing to the prevailing inertia are forced into confrontation.
But that when they are, the realignments are highly disruptive, in ways unpredictable in advance.
Meaning that the groundhog’s looming shadow is long, dark and ominous.
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