SEC Official Backs Formal Inspection Plan for Brokerage Auditors

The SEC’s top accountant has called on the US audit regulator to create a permanent inspection program for auditors of broker-dealers.

The ask reprises a project the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board launched in 2019 during the first Trump administration.

“One of the things that we’ve asked the PCAOB to do is to finalize their broker-dealer inspection program so it’s no longer an interim program,” Kurt Hohl, chief accountant to the Securities and Exchange Commission, said Friday during a Practising Law Institute event in Washington.

• For more than a decade, the board has routinely reviewed the work of brokerage auditors. ...