, Columnist
Take Away the Auditors' Mandate
Two deals this week explain why Congress should end the rule requiring audits of publicly traded companies.
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There were two stories this week reinforcing my view that Congress should revoke the valuable franchise it created for the accounting profession 80 years ago when it made outside audits mandatory for public companies. PricewaterhouseCoopers was the subject of both of them.
The first was a feature by Bloomberg News reporter Jesse Drucker about a Pricewaterhouse partner in Dublin who helped turn Ireland into a global tax-avoidance hub -- and saved some of Silicon Valley's largest companies billions of dollars in U.S. income taxes. The other was the news that Pricewaterhouse is buying theconsulting firm Booz & Co. for an undisclosed sum.