Course: AC 557
Unit: Six
Professor: Bunney Schmidt
Student: Saad Panja

Company and Situation:
Created by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board or PCAOB requires auditors of U.S. public companies be subject to external and independent oversight. As well as a “provision requiring auditors to evaluate the effectiveness of companies’ audit committees” (Sharp Paine & Eric Bettcher, 2006). On October 2002 there were four appointed members and two of them were Goelzer and Charles D. Niemeier who were both accountants that had served at the SEC (Sharp Paine & Eric Bettcher, 2006). Other two were Bill Gradison who was a former congressman, mayor, and businessman; and Gillan who was general counsel at California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS). All four of these new members have had extensive law experience.
Identify Strengths and Weaknesses and Alternatives:
The first thing that the board needed to do was set up offices and recruiting staff. Since there was no staff at first the board members took it among themselves to identify, interview, and hire new staff. A few of these new staff members included a director of registration and inspection as well as a director of human resources. In April of 2003 PCAOB received an official certification from SEC at which time there were about 30 employees with this organization. PCAOB was established by Congress in order to protect investors and the public interest by promoting accurate, informative, and independent audit reports. The PCAOB aims to improve audit quality, reduce the risks of auditing failures in the U.S. public securities market and promote public trust in both the financial reporting process and auditing profession. (PCAOB, 2012). PCAOB necessitate senior financial managers to enforce a code of conduct ("The sarbanes-oxley act," 2003). This code