![](\"https:\/\/images.jacobinmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/10141738\/GettyImages-2249564758-900x524.jpg\")
Amid President Donald Trump\u2019s frenzied<\/a> deregulation of financial<\/a> markets<\/a>, his administration just stacked the country\u2019s top watchdog of corporate auditors with Trump loyalists and former executives of the companies they will now oversee. Designed to prevent another Enron catastrophe, the watchdog organization supervises the handful of big auditors that dominate the space and ensures major companies aren\u2019t cooking their books, deceiving their investors, and jeopardizing the country\u2019s financial stability.<\/p>\n On January 30, Trump\u2019s US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair, Paul Atkins, a \u201cderegulation zealot<\/a>,\u201d announced<\/a> a suite of new officials to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), the independent organization tasked with overseeing public companies\u2019 accounting. One of those appointees served as a senior partner at one of the auditing giants he will now monitor, while two others come straight from the Trump administration, further tying the ostensibly independent organization to the Trump White House.<\/p>\n The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board is a nonprofit corporation created in the wake of the 2001 accounting scandal at the Houston-based energy giant Enron, which led to a $40 billion shareholder lawsuit<\/a> and the dissolution of one of the world\u2019s largest accounting firms.<\/p>\n The board, which operates under the Securities and Exchange Commission, now sets industry auditing and enforcement standards and oversees the private auditors that review major companies\u2019 books, primarily to protect investors and ensure market stability. Much of the organization\u2019s work focuses on the \u201cBig Four\u201d accounting firms \u2014 Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) \u2014 which effectively operate<\/a> as an oligopoly in auditing major corporations.<\/p>\n Because the Big Four firms narrowly compete<\/a> against each other in a captured market, there\u2019s an incentive for them to go easier on the corporations that pay their salaries, such as by carving out more tax and auditing loopholes.<\/p>\n PCAOB investigations have found that these firms\u2019 audits are not always reliable. A 2019 probe found<\/a> that 50 percent of the KPMG audits examined were deemed inadequate, along with 27 percent at EY, 24 percent at PwC, and 20 percent at Deloitte.<\/p>\n Under the Biden administration, the board’s former chairperson, Erica Williams, implemented<\/a> more aggressive disciplinary actions<\/a>, delivered record-setting fines<\/a>, and increased scrutiny of the Big Four accounting firms, which complained<\/a> about the new standards. Williams was pushed out in July 2025 by SEC chair Atkins, marking the third board shake-up in less than a decade.<\/p>\n Demetrios Logotheti, Williams\u2019s new replacement as chair, worked as a top executive at EY for decades, plus served as a senior adviser to Trump\u2019s Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2020.<\/p>\n \u201cAppointing a retired Big 4 audit partner \u2014 a 40+ year veteran of EY \u2014 as Chair of the audit regulator is a slap in the face to everyone who has ever suffered through an accounting fraud, especially one EY missed,\u201d wrote<\/a> corporate governance expert Francine McKenna.<\/p>\n Other new board appointees<\/a> include Kyle Hauptman, who worked at Lehman Brothers and the conservative policy think tank the American Enterprise Institute, and Mark Calabria, who will also retain his job as a senior adviser at Trump\u2019s Office of Management and Budget. Experts have criticized<\/a> that these moves jeopardize the PCAOB\u2019s independence<\/a> from politics.<\/p>\n Earlier in January, Atkins also announced<\/a> that he had cut the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board\u2019s budget by more than 9 percent and slashed the fees that accounting companies and corporations pay to the board.<\/p>\n The embattled organization has narrowly survived in recent years. The Heritage Foundation-backed Project 2025 first floated<\/a> abolishing the PCAOB in its nearly one-thousand-page blueprint for Trump\u2019s second term. Last year, lawmakers attempted to eliminate the agency altogether in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, though that provision<\/a> was eventually struck from the legislation.<\/p>\n Atkins\u2019s Public Company Accounting Oversight Board shuffle comes as some experts predict<\/a> that financial institutions\u2019 use of artificial intelligence could make corporate accounting practices more opaque to auditors.<\/p>\n In July 2024, the board itself warned<\/a> that the \u201c\u2018blackbox\u2019 nature of some GenAI tools and the lack of consistent output produced by GenAI . . . raises questions around the auditability of certain GenAI-created output.\u201d As major corporations integrate<\/a> AI throughout their organizations, some of the Big Four firms have also been enthusiastically embracing<\/a> AI in their auditing processes.<\/p>\n This article was first published by the Lever<\/em><\/a>, an award-winning independent investigative newsroom.<\/p>\r\n
Source link jacobin.com<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump has been carrying out a frenzied deregulation of financial markets. Recently, the administration stacked the US\u2019s top watchdog of corporate auditors with Trump loyalists and former executives of the companies they will now oversee.On January 30, Trump\u2019s US Securities and Exchange Commission chair, Paul Atkins, a \u201cderegulation zealot,\u201d announced a suite of new officials to the Public…","protected":false},"author":131,"featured_media":79,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_analytify_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/131"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}