I've often thought that the responsibility for the selection of an audit firm should be transferred to the Govt/Quango which should be responsible for running a competitive tender for the audit assignment, with company still paying the audit fee.

I feel this would have several benefits
- audit firm couldn't be threatened by the management of the company with losing the audit & so their (perceived) independence should improve
- rotation would be easy to enforce from the centre
- supplementary services to the company wouldn't be relevant in the selection process
- as well as competitive tender, the Quango would also have plenty of billing info/data to assess whether the fee was appropriate for the industry sector etc
- alumni ties between companies & audit firms would be irrelevant (how often does the CEO/CFO appoint their old firm!)

Challenge would be to keep the Quango honest & free of links to the audit firms! As regards being competent to make a selection, I believe that there are enough sufficient skilled folks around that can be co-opted to such a body.

You hit the nail on the head with the possibility that management teams might “wake up and question: ‘What are we getting for our money?”

How much value is there is a bunch of stale SOX documents that do not reflect what is dynamically going on within an organization?

Any of the new blog / wiki tools would move work flows from a collection of hard to trace emails, spreadsheets and word docs into a access controlled, audit trail enhanced environment.

The thing I am interested in is seeing which of the Big 4 realize that the advent of “Personal Servers” is going change the game as much or even more than the advent of PCs. Which ever member of the Big 4 does get it, they stand to gain tremendous market share over the other three as they show companies how to both do better and reduce SOX costs.

- Rod