PCAOB seeks input on its strategic priorities

With an almost entirely new slate of members and a new chair, the PCAOB is seeking input on its future strategic priorities.

During an open meeting on March 31, the audit overseer announced it had issued a request for public comment to help shape its 2026–2030 strategic plan. It’s accepting comments through May 15.

“I believe the PCAOB functions best when it is informed by the perspectives of participants from the full financial reporting ecosystem,” PCAOB Chair Demetrios (Jim) Logothetis said in a news release.

The board is specifically keen to hear the public’s thoughts on where its priorities should lie over the next two to five years; what changes it should make to inspections; how it can be more transparent with stakeholders; and in what ways it should “consider deploying technology, including AI, to help further its investor-protection mission,” among other things.

Recent history. It’s a peculiar time for the PCAOB. Republican lawmakers tried (unsuccessfully) to eliminate the PCAOB altogether last year as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. In January, the SEC approved a 9.4% cut to the PCAOB’s calendar-year budget and slashed board members’ salaries. Not long after, Atkins’s SEC appointed four new board members to the PCAOB, including Logothetis as its new chair.

More recently, the SEC posted job listings online for a new SOX group, which suggests the commission “is seeking to absorb some functions normally assigned” to PCAOB, Reuters reported in March.

AuditBoard senior advisor Richard Chambers, former president and CEO of the Institute of Internal Auditors, told CFO Brew in February that the revamped PCAOB “doesn’t look like it’s going to be a board that’s going to go in with a very aggressive regulatory agenda, putting new rules in place.” Any rulemaking it does undertake will probably try to make the compliance process easier, he added.

The PCAOB was formed after Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 to oversee the audits of publicly owned companies.