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A88357 1 (2003-09-03)

handle is hein.gao/gaobadvup0001 and id is 1 raw text is: i G A 0Comptroller General Ac- ntablilty - Integrity * Reliability of the United States United States General Accounting Office Washington, DC 20548 September 3, 2003 Office of the Secretary Public Company Accounting Oversight Board 1666 K Street, NW Washington, DC 20006-2803 Subject: Proposed Rules on Inspections of Registered Public Accounting Firms This letter provides the U.S. General Accounting Office's (GAO) comments on the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's (PCAOB) July 28, 2003, proposed rules on accounting firm inspections, as mandated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. GAO supports improved transparency and accountability in the accounting profession, and we believe that the proposed inspection rules will help in this endeavor. In finalizing the rules on inspections, we urge the PCAOB to consider the important issue of coordination with the profession's self-regulatory peer review program in order to avoid duplication and to minimize the burden on CPA firms that are required to undergo both a PCAOB inspection and a peer review. GAO envisions a system of coordination in which peer reviewers would place appropriate reliance on a firm's PCAOB inspection report such that peer reviewers could use this information to possibly reduce the scope of their peer review, as appropriate. In order to make such a system possible, peer reviewers would need specific information and access to documentation on the scope of the inspections or information from the PCAOB on the specific level of assurance and reliance that can be placed on the inspection reports for purposes of planning the scope of the peer review engagement. Coordination of effort between PCAOB inspections and peer reviews is particularly important because many CPA firms are subject to the peer review requirements of GovernmentAuditing Standards promulgated by the GAO under the statutory authority awarded to the Comptroller General of the United States. For example, the following laws and regulations require peer reviews as applicable under Government Auditing Standards:

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