The Audit Committee Handbook, Fourth Edition.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Bookshelf - Brief Article - Book Review

The Audit Committee Handbook, Fourth Edition. By Louis Braiotta Jr. John Wiley & Sons, 428 pages. $75.

This latest edition comes five years after the third, issued in 1999--and we all know how much the state of audit committees has altered since then. Yes, the impact of the Blue Ribbon Commission was rolling through corporate suites then, but the collapse of Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom and other icons in the years since (and the subsequent passage of The Sarbanes-Oxley Act) have made service on audit committees far more demanding.

Don't look for any kind of narrative here. Braiotta, a professor of accounting in the School of Management at SUNY Binghampton and a former Ernst & Ernst accountant, has fashioned The Audit Committee Handbook into something of an encyclopedia about audit committee policies, practices and issues. It's well organized into broad headings like the planning function...