On Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced the removal William Duhnke from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) without providing a reason for his dismissal in the official press release. The PCAOB regulates audits conducted on publicly traded companies. Board member Duane DesParte will serve as the acting chair.
Duhnke has come under fire in recent months from investors who claim the PCAOB failed to sufficiently incorporate their feedback into its work.
“The PCAOB has an opportunity to live up to Congress’s vision in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act,” said SEC Chair Gary Gensler in a statement. “I look forward to working with my fellow commissioners, Acting Chair DesParte, and the staff of the PCAOB to set it on a path to better protect investors by ensuring that public company audits are informative, accurate, and independent.”
Last month, U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) wrote a letter imploring the SEC to remove members of the PCAOB, claiming the Trump administration took steps to compromise the PCAOB’s autonomy and prowess that led the watchdog to, for example, weaken auditor-independence rules and exclude investors from participating in its policy-making process, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The removal of Duhnke by the SEC, who was introduced as chairman in January 2018 by then-President Donald Trump, could potentially lead to the complete removal of the PCAOB board. It was established by Congress through the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, and last experienced a board replacement in 2017 after a scandal involving the leak of confidential inspections data.
The official SEC report can be found here. 