PCAOB Gradison - a single auditing standard the primary goal

17 September 2008

"Accounting and auditing in the United States are at a crossroads”, Gradison said. “My personal view is that in the long run adoption of a single high-quality auditing standard ought to be the primary goal.”

The two sets of accounting standards, GAAP and IFRS, and three sets of auditing standards, ISAs, ASB standards, and the PCAOB standards for issuers present significant challenges for auditors, issuers, investors, and regulators in the US, Bill Gradison, Founding Board Member of the PCAOB said and underlined the tension between US standards and the move toward convergence of standards elsewhere around the world.

 

"Accounting and auditing in the United States are at a crossroads”, he said. “My personal view is that in the long run adoption of a single high-quality auditing standard ought to be the primary goal.”

 

However, he also underlined that this is not an endorsement for ISAs as the new PCAOB standards will go beyond them. “The chances of full convergence of these two standards are somewhere between zero and nil since there has not – to put it mildly – been a rush of non-US standards writers to adopt anything close to PCAOB’s internal control over financial reporting standard AS5, which is required by Section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley”, he said.

 

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