Tucked inside the Trump Administration’s $4.8 Trillion budget proposal for fiscal year 2021, released last week, is a plan that has caught the eye of Big Four auditors and internal auditors as well: The White House has proposed to merge the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board into the Securities and Exchange Commission by 2022.
“Consolidating these functions within SEC will reduce regulatory ambiguity and duplicative statutory authorities,” the White House said its budget plan. The White House also says merging the agencies would save $580 million through 2030. However, that would not result in taxpayer savings, since the PCAOB is funded by fees paid by companies and brokerage firms and not the federal government.
The PCAOB, which was created as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, oversees audits of public companies and broker-dealers and sets rules that govern such audits to “protect the interests of investors and further the public interest in the preparation of informative, accurate and independent audit reports,” according to its mandate. It also performs inspections of public audits firms.
The reaction to the proposal to merge the PCAOB into the SEC has been mixed. Some fear it would result in a less powerful agency that won’t be an effective watchdog. Francine McKenna, a longtime critic of the Big Four, wrote in an opinion article in the Financial Times that merging the agencies could roll back oversight of public accounting. “The solution is not to submerge the PCAOB into the SEC. The commission already oversees the auditing watchdog and, if anything, is part of the problem. Combining the two would make it much harder to scrutinize how well audits are performed, reducing individual accountability of auditors and their overseers,” she wrote.
Others say the agency has been largely ineffective at reigning in the Big Four and that any change would be good.
Either way, its way too early to determine if the proposal by the Trump administration will ever see the light of day. The presidential election in November could change everything. And even if Trump wins re-election, it’s not clear whether he has the authority to merge the agencies without input from what is likely to be a divided Congress. 
Trump and his gang don’t like any regulatory and ther uy enjoyed to deregulation so want to delete PACOB because Multinational large corporation to can do everything. US stick marker experience shows in lac of supervisory and regulatory the fraud, neglect and corrupt will b increased