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To: shades who wrote (60065)	5/1/2006 5:52:49 PM
From: shades	Respond to of 110194

PCAOB Seeks To Push Auditors To Be More Efficient (Adds details about May 10 SEC-PCAOB roundtable. By Siobhan Hughes Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--The U.S. audit oversight board, criticized by public companies who say it has allowed internal-controls audits to drag on, plans to pressure auditors to work more efficiently. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board said Monday that its 2006 annual inspections will investigate whether the Big Four and other auditing firms are efficient in assessing internal controls over financial reporting. Companies have complained that auditors drive up costs by focusing too much on minutiae. "As part of PCAOB's efforts to improve the cost-effectiveness of these audits, our inspectors, as they go into the field, will be making a focused effort to ascertain that auditors have achieved the objectives described in the board's internal control auditing standard with the least expenditure of effort and resources," said Bill Gradison, PCAOB's acting chairman, in a statement. Most public companies are in the midst of the third year of bringing in outside auditors to assess the quality of internal controls over financial reporting. The internal-controls audit was mandated by the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley law, enacted after accounting scandals at Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. The scandals brought to light numerous problems in the accounting industry and suggested that auditors were ignoring red flags in financial statements as they sought to win lucrative fees for consulting services. More than 50 people, including executives from PricewaterhouseCoopers International Ltd. and Microsoft Corp., will be on hand May 10 at a joint PCAOB-Securities and Exchange Commission roundtable to discuss their experiences with the internal-controls portion of the Sarbanes-Oxley law. A vocal group of companies, backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and with the support of some House Republicans, is seeking to exempt at least 70% of public companies from complying with the internal-controls portion of Sarbanes-Oxley. Auditing firms with more than 100 public company clients must be inspected once a year by the PCAOB. Other firms that audit at least one public company are inspected about once every three years. In the 2005 audits, the audit oversight board uncovered failures in the audit work of each of the Big Four firms, noting that in some instances auditors hadn't obtained enough evidence to support their opinions about financial statements. The audit board said Monday that it would inspect whether auditors use risk-based approaches to determine the nature, timing and extent of internal-controls testing, and whether auditors "took full advantage of the opportunities available to use the work of others," including the client company's internal audit staff. -By Siobhan Hughes, Dow Jones Newswires; 202-862-6654; Siobhan.Hughes@dowjones.com (END) Dow Jones Newswires May 01, 2006 13:34 ET (17:34 GMT) Copyright (c) 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.- - 01 34 PM EDT 05-01-06