Accounting Oversight Group Votes to Close

The Public Oversight Board, an accounting industry supervisory group, voted to close Tuesday after the group said it was excluded from SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt’s new plans for enforcing accounting standards.

Pitt responded by urging the five-member board to reconsider its action. “Nothing I said on Thursday, or since, was in any way intended to suggest that the POB had no role to play,” Pitt wrote in a letter to the board’s chairman.

The board, created in 1977 to oversee the quality of corporate audits, said it would go out of existence by March 31.

In a letter to Pitt, the board said it was not consulted and was not given a role in Pitt’s plan for an oversight body to police accountants and review audits in the wake of Enron’s fall.

Bloomberg News