Public Company Accounting Oversight Board - History

History

The PCAOB was created in response to an ever-increasing number of accounting "restatements" (corrections of past financial statements) by public companies during the 1990s, and a series of high-profile accounting scandals and record-setting bankruptcies by large public companies, notably those in 2002 involving WorldCom and Enron. Prior to the creation of the PCAOB, the audit industry was essentially self-regulated through the Public Oversight Board, a private organization whose members were appointed by the auditing industry. The Public Oversight Board was formally dissolved on March 31, 2002, though its members had resigned en masse in January 2002 to protest then-SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt's proposal for a new private auditor oversight body to regulate the industry (a proposal which would evolve into the PCAOB).