Chair's corner.

• Author: Bunting, Robert L.

I recently spoke with a past chair of the AICPA Board of Directors who expressed amazement at the amount of time the chair is now required to spend on AICPA activities. As we compared his experience with those of more recent AICPA chairs, one glaring difference stood out.

My predecessor attended meetings with only one regulatory organization during his term of office. The AICPA has long-standing joint projects with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy. NASBA and the AICPA share responsibility for the CPA Exam and work jointly on the Uniform Accountancy Act. Because of these shared responsibilities, we have regular meetings between the staff and leadership groups of the two organizations to discuss our respective initiatives, resolve differences and keep our relationship productive.

On occasion, past AICPA chairs have participated in leadership meetings with the Government Accountability Office or the Securities and Exchange Commission as issues arose that required leader-to-leader communication. But such meetings were not routine.

Today our world could not be more different. The good news is that today CPAs and our services are much more recognized as critical to the functioning of the American economy. The more challenging news is at we have many more real-world and would-be regulators who believe that they have a public interest stake in how we perform our services. In addition to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, which did not exist three years ago, there are many other government and regulatory organizations with a keen interest in how we perform accounting and tax services.

The list includes the GAO for "Yellow Book" audits, the Department of Labor for pension audits, the Internal Revenue Service for tax compliance and planning, the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the area of fraud detection, and, as always, the SEC. We also meet regularly with representatives of the Financial Accounting Standards Board and are developing a growing dialog with the Federal Reserve. While these organizations have always had a stake in the effectiveness of our services, the events of the past few years have heightened their interest and, in most cases, their activism.

As in the past, we continue to work with state CPA societies in their outreach to state boards of...