Christina Ho’s next act

PCAOB member Christina Ho made waves when she resigned from the audit oversight board in January 2026. A frequent dissenter, Ho, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, “voted against more potential auditing rules than anyone in the PCAOB’s two-decade history.”

Now, she’s hoping to reshape the audit profession in a different way: by joining a startup, Oath Verified, that aims to use AI to make audits more accurate, effective, and, yes, cheaper.

As a regulator, “I was very passionate about speaking about how auditing can be reimagined because of technology and how it can be made so much better,” Ho told CFO Brew. At Oath, she said, “I get to help not only build the platform but build a methodology that is foundational” to it.

Traditionally, audits are performed once a year on a small sample of a company’s financial data. Now, some firms are using automation and AI to conduct full population tests. Oath Verified’s software, Ho said, connects directly to clients’ systems, meaning auditors don’t need to go back and forth with clients to obtain documentation. It can test 100% of data and verify records in alignment with the monthly close, she added.

It’s official. Other auditing startups purport to do the same thing, but Oath Verified is not just a SaaS company; it’s also a licensed CPA firm. Ho has signed her first report and plans to sign an audit opinion later this month, she said, and is gearing up to serve clients for the FY 2026 audit season.

Actually performing audits is central to Oath’s mission, Lucas Ward, the serial entrepreneur and former CTO who is one of Oath Verified’s three co-founders, told us. “I don’t think you can change things by just selling software to existing companies. You really have to be the thing to change things,” he said.

Oath Verified can use what it learns from its clients to improve its processes, Ho said, and being a small startup rather than a long-established CPA firm allows Oath to be more innovative. “You will not be able to fully realize the benefit of the technology,” she pointed out, “if all you’re doing is optimizing the legacy model.”

However, combining a CPA firm and software firm has led to some regulatory complexity. Because it raised $6.6 million in venture capital funding and also conducts audits, Oath Verified had to register with the AICPA as an alternative practice structure (APS). Ho has twice submitted comments to the AICPA on proposed revisions to the institute’s Code of Professional Conduct regarding APSs, asking, among other things, for more clarity on how the independence rules apply to technology vendors.

The AICPA’s Professional Ethics Executive Committee, which is drafting the revisions, is carefully considering Ho’s and other commenters’ feedback, Carl Mayes, VP for ethics and firm quality at the AICPA, told CFO Brew.

Cheaper audits? Will automation and AI change the composition of the auditing workforce? Software can perform many parts of the audit that once were the province of humans, such as creating spreadsheets and doing the tie-out, Ho said. A system that connects to clients’ data could also cut down on data collection chores.

Presumably, that could make audits faster and cheaper. “We can be more cost effective and offer that value to the client,” Ho said. “‘Better, faster, cheaper’ normally don’t go together, but in this case it does go together because it’s anchored on one change: being able to use the technology.” Some jobs may be lost: “Of course, some of the jobs are going to be automated and replaced by AI,” she said,

The result may be more auditors morphing into “accounting engineers,” Ho and Lucas agreed. Even Ho has gotten into vibe-coding. “I love building, and I consider myself an accounting engineer,” she said, noting that she’s built a planning and risk-assessment tool. Accountants who “have the judgment and the domain expertise and understanding can build these tools in a way that is solving the problem,” she said, and then hand it over to the product team and engineers to “productize.”

The “accounting engineer” role, Ho and Lucas believe, will become more prominent in the future and, in time, could give accounting a flashier reputation.

“When I was on the [PCAOB], I always wanted to help the profession be more relevant,” Ho said. “I hated…that people constantly refer to the auditor as the ‘gatekeeper’…That is the most uninspiring title ever. Who wants to be a gatekeeper?”