History
Below are a few key milestones in the evolution of audit committees:
- 1939: The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) first endorsed the audit committee concept.
- 1972: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) first recommends that publicly held companies establish audit committees composed of outside (non-management) directors.
- 1977: NYSE adopts a listing requirement that audit committees be composed entirely of independent directors.
- 1988: AICPA issues SAS 61 "Communication with Audit Committees" addressing communications between the external auditor, audit committee and management of SEC reporting companies.
- 1999: NYSE, NASD, AMEX, SEC and AICPA finalize major rule changes based on Blue Ribbon Committee on Improving the Effectiveness of the Corporate Audit Committee.
- 2002: Sarbanes-Oxley Act is passed in the wake of corporate scandals and includes whistleblower and financial expert disclosure requirements for audit committees.
Read more about this topic: Audit Committee
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)