President Donald Trump has been carrying out a frenzied deregulation of financial markets. Recently, the administration stacked the US’s top watchdog of corporate auditors with Trump loyalists and former executives of the companies they will now oversee.
Amid President Donald Trump’s frenzied deregulation of financial markets, his administration just stacked the country’s top watchdog of corporate auditors with Trump loyalists and former executives of the companies they will now oversee. Designed to prevent another Enron catastrophe, the watchdog organization supervises the handful of big auditors that dominate the space and ensures major companies aren’t cooking their books, deceiving their investors, and jeopardizing the country’s financial stability.
On January 30, Trump’s US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair, Paul Atkins, a “deregulation zealot,” announced a suite of new officials to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), the independent organization tasked with overseeing public companies’ accounting. One of those appointees served as a senior partner at one of the auditing giants he will now monitor, while two others come straight from the Trump administration, further tying the ostensibly independent organization to the Trump White House.
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board is a nonprofit corporation created in the wake of the 2001 accounting scandal at the Houston-based energy giant Enron, which led to a $40 billion shareholder lawsuit and the dissolution of one of the world’s largest accounting firms.
The board, which operates under the Securities and Exchange Commission, now sets industry auditing and enforcement standards and oversees the private auditors that review major companies’ books, primarily to protect investors and ensure market stability. Much of the organization’s work focuses on the “Big Four” accounting firms — Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) — which effectively operate as an oligopoly in auditing major corporations.
Because the Big Four firms narrowly compete against each other in a captured market, there’s an incentive for them to go easier on the corporations that pay their salaries, such as by carving out more tax and auditing loopholes.
PCAOB investigations have found that these firms’ audits are not always reliable. A 2019 probe found that 50 percent of the KPMG audits examined were deemed inadequate, along with 27 percent at EY, 24 percent at PwC, and 20 percent at Deloitte.
Under the Biden administration, the board’s former chairperson, Erica Williams, implemented more aggressive disciplinary actions, delivered record-setting fines, and increased scrutiny of the Big Four accounting firms, which complained about the new standards. Williams was pushed out in July 2025 by SEC chair Atkins, marking the third board shake-up in less than a decade.
Demetrios Logotheti, Williams’s new replacement as chair, worked as a top executive at EY for decades, plus served as a senior adviser to Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2020.
“Appointing a retired Big 4 audit partner — a 40+ year veteran of EY — as Chair of the audit regulator is a slap in the face to everyone who has ever suffered through an accounting fraud, especially one EY missed,” wrote corporate governance expert Francine McKenna.
Other new board appointees include Kyle Hauptman, who worked at Lehman Brothers and the conservative policy think tank the American Enterprise Institute, and Mark Calabria, who will also retain his job as a senior adviser at Trump’s Office of Management and Budget. Experts have criticized that these moves jeopardize the PCAOB’s independence from politics.
Earlier in January, Atkins also announced that he had cut the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s budget by more than 9 percent and slashed the fees that accounting companies and corporations pay to the board.
The embattled organization has narrowly survived in recent years. The Heritage Foundation-backed Project 2025 first floated abolishing the PCAOB in its nearly one-thousand-page blueprint for Trump’s second term. Last year, lawmakers attempted to eliminate the agency altogether in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, though that provision was eventually struck from the legislation.
Atkins’s Public Company Accounting Oversight Board shuffle comes as some experts predict that financial institutions’ use of artificial intelligence could make corporate accounting practices more opaque to auditors.
In July 2024, the board itself warned that the “‘blackbox’ nature of some GenAI tools and the lack of consistent output produced by GenAI . . . raises questions around the auditability of certain GenAI-created output.” As major corporations integrate AI throughout their organizations, some of the Big Four firms have also been enthusiastically embracing AI in their auditing processes.
This article was first published by the Lever, an award-winning independent investigative newsroom.