文章基本信息

标题：Ralph rides again - Accounting
作者：David Campbell
期刊名称：CFO
印刷版ISSN：8756-7113
电子版ISSN：1560-3539
出版年度：2003
卷号：May 2003
出版社：CFO Publishing Corporation

Ralph rides again - Accounting

David Campbell

RALPH NADER IS TAKING on the accounting regulators. The consumer advocate and former Presidential candidate wants to help restore integrity to an accounting profession that he says has been compromised by scandal. In early March, he announced the formation of the Association for Integrity in Accounting (AIA), a public-interest group that intends to keep a close eye on the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory agencies. The industry watchdogs, he says, need watching themselves.

"CFOs should welcome it," says Nader, who made his name taking on the American automobile industry and now has Wall Street fixed in his crosshairs. "Inside a corporation, people are subjected to a lot of pressures. It's very important for them to feel they have people outside supporting their decisions."

Comprised of accountants and accounting professors, the AIA will stake out positions on stock-option expensing and other accounting issues, present them before Congress and the SEC, write editorial opinions, and, says Nader, "encourage more fearless publication of what's on the minds of accountants around the country."

The AIA proposes to monitor the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), which Congress created last summer following Enron's collapse. Nader's group also says it will turn up the heat on the Financial Accounting Standards Board. "FASB has fine pretensions, but it doesn't deliver," says Nader. "It has allowed itself to be browbeaten by Congress and corporate officials when it has tried to do the right thing." A spokesperson for FASB declined comment.

AIA founding member Tony Tinker, an accounting professor at CUNY-Baruch College, says the appointed watchdogs have conflicts of interest, especially in how they are funded. "The SEC is funded on an annual appropriation by Congress and is vulnerable to congressional pressures," he says. "FASB is funded by the Financial Accounting Foundation, and the FAF is financed by large clients of the Big Four and by the Big Four itself. In effect, the auditees are appointing the auditors."

SEC spokeswoman Christi Harlan says the SEC is an independent body funded through stock-transaction fees and fines. As far as funding, she says, all Congress does is tell the SEC how much it can collect.

Mary McCue, spokeswoman for the PCAOB, says the board has proposed rules for registration of public auditing firms and accounting support fees that will be the principal sources for its funding, and says it will carefully consider the views of "all who can help the board carry out its mission."