Just keeping it warm.
Dave Michaels reports at The Wall Street Journal that SEC Chairman Jay Clayton’s preferred choice to lead the PCAOB is rumored to be the same person everyone thought it would be:
SEC Chairman Jay Clayton wants William Duhnke to become the PCAOB’s next chairman, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. Mr. Duhnke is director of the Senate Rules Committee and a longtime aide to Sen. Richard Shelby (R., Ala.), who was formerly chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.
Duhnke’s name has been floating around the PCAOB chairmanship for years, especially since current chair James Doty has been such a thorn in the side of the Big 4.
The chair is only one of several board positions that are open or occupied by members whose terms have expired. Michaels reports that Chairman Clayton “is preparing to advance a slate of nominees,” although SEC itself is not a full strength; two commissioner nominees are still hung up in confirmation.
[WSJ]
The request, sources said, is seen as a direct response to the move by the U.S. regulators in the case of scandal-hit Longtop Financial Technologies Ltd, and to ensure that firms do not succumb to pressure to hand over documents to regulators outside of China. Last month the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) asked an American court to enforce a subpoena it sent to Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu’s China practice for documents from its audit of Longtop.Two sources from the audit industry told Reuters that the Ministry of Finance and China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) met last week with the so-called ‘Big Four’ audit firms — KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young and Deloitte — along with two smaller firms. The firms were requested by the government to conduct an urgent review of all audits they had done on U.S.-listed Chinese firms in 2010 along with work on U.S. initial public offerings by Chinese companies. [
