Schapiro Aide Said to Be Leaving SEC for PwC Accounting Firm
Kayla J. Gillan, a senior adviser to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro, is resigning to take a job at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, according to people familiar with the matter.
Gillan will be a principal in a new group at the firm focusing on regulations affecting auditing firms, according to one of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the move hasn’t been announced.
Gillan was hired to be Schapiro’s deputy chief of staff in 2009 as an advocate of the investor community. The SEC had noted then that Gillan had experience regulating auditors as one of the founding members of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the industry’s U.S. watchdog.
She becomes the first former PCAOB member to later work for one of the so-called Big Four accounting firms that she once regulated. Other ex-SEC officials also have moved to the firm, including Lori Richards, the agency’s former inspections and compliance chief. Her replacement, Carlo di Florio, came from PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Gillan, a former general counsel of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, joined the PCAOB in 2003 and was the point person for investor interests. In February 2008, she became chief administrative officer of RiskMetrics Group Inc., now a unit of New York-based MSCI Inc. (MSCI), and left a year later for the SEC.
Congress established the PCAOB, a nonprofit corporation funded by fees on public companies and reporting to the SEC, to oversee auditing firms.
Gillan didn’t respond to an e-mail seeking comment. Steven G. Silber, a PricewaterhouseCoopers spokesman, declined to comment.
Escaped Regulation
The industry largely escaped new regulation from the Dodd- Frank Act, the financial regulatory overhaul enacted last year. All of the major firms, including Ernst & Young LLP, KPMG LLP and Deloitte & Touche LLP, had audited companies that got U.S. bailouts or, in the case of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (LEHMQ), went bankrupt.
On April 6, Senate lawmakers held a hearing to examine accounting firms’ role in the financial crisis and how the profession might help prevent another one.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jesse Hamilton in Washington at jhamilton33@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Lawrence Roberts at lroberts13@bloomberg.net.
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