What are the biggest reputation problems facing the AICPA and CPAs in general?
Clearly, we acknowledge that some instances that have come up have not been our best day as a profession. There have been mistakes made in our part of the process, but there are also a lot of other issues. Some of these [blowups] may be accounting errors, or, in some cases, people may have thought it was good accounting and been wrong. In some cases, we might have missed something. In some cases it might have been concealed from us, but our role is to be testing what management has done. We test, we evaluate, we make sure they have adhered to the rules. Q: What are the misperceptions you seek to correct? A: It’s easy to say the auditors caused a company to fail. We never caused a company to fail — bad business causes a company to fail. The auditor is not necessarily the business conscience for America. Q: Given all that has happened, shouldn’t auditing become more investigative? A: We have been working hard to have deeper skepticism. That’s partly achieved by doing specific procedures
