Investors Seek Tougher Quality Control Rules for Audit Firms

Investor and consumer advocates want leaders of U.S. audit firms to be held accountable for the quality of their work, which means that they need a measuring stick to assess their performance.

In recent comment letters to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, investor advocates renewed their years-long effort to establish a set of performance metrics referred to as audit quality indicators. The board, which serves as the U.S. audit regulator, considered such a requirement in 2015 but abandoned the effort.

The comments responded to a board project to overhaul its rules for the systems firms have in place ...