Progressives tell SEC chair to fire Trump-era audit board

Progressive groups and consumer advocates called on SEC Chair Gary Gensler to fire members of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the nation’s accounting auditor, saying the board has “collapsed into a pattern of non-enforcement and retaliation against whistleblowers“ and had lost important staff members under former President Donald Trump.

The groups called for a PCAOB shakeup in a letter to the SEC late last week. The demand is the latest sign of increased pressure on Gensler from progressive political groups to undo changes made under the Trump administration. Signatories to the letter included Revolving Door Project, Americans for Financial Reform, Public Citizen, Greenpeace U.S., and Demand Progress.

Trump appointees had allowed the PCAOB to "atrophy" and threw agency operations into "chaos," the letter said, citing lengthy vacancies and resignations of key staff.

The SEC did not immediately have comment on the letter.

The PCAOB has been beset by scandal in recent years. Gensler’s predecessor, Jay Clayton, oversaw the appointment of an entirely new board in 2017 after regulators discovered PCAOB staffers had been providing one of the four major U.S. accounting audit firms, KPMG, with inside information on inspections.

"Rather than retaining Board members who facilitated the demise of the PCAOB’s commitment to its mission, the SEC should install five new PCAOB board members fully committed to high standards in American public firm auditing," the groups said in the letter.

The SEC oversees the PCAOB, which is a nonprofit corporation established by Congress under the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act to oversee public company audits in the wake of the Enron scandal.

The letter comes after Revolving Door Project wrote in a blog post earlier this month that Gensler should "clean house" at the PCAOB.

The post cited a 2019 report from the Project on Government Oversight that found that less than 1 percent of the board's enforcement actions between 2005 and 2019 were against the big four U.S. accounting firms or auditors — Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The four firms collectively audit almost half of all publicly traded companies in the U.S. and nearly every company in the S&P 500 index, POGO said.