New SGC grading fees

[CMIZ5290]

Originally Posted by BobC

Irv,

The CPA profession more or less self-regulates. Some CPAs take additional training and so on and become peer reviewers, along with everything else they normally do. A CPA firm can then engage any qualified, registered peer reviewer to come in and go over their work and practices and report the results to state accountancy boards for them every third year, as required by the profession. Oh, and the firm that hired the peer reviewer also has to pay them at their standard hourly rates for the work they do. Talk about adding insult to injury, huh?

I actually happen to be a registered CPA peer reviewer myself, which is probably another reason I may be a little more sensitive to the idea of peer review and adherence to standards and independence by someone giving their opinion on something, like TPG companies do. However, for the record, I am only qualified and registered to perform peer reviews on a particular type of specialized audit on Service Organization Controls (fka SAS-70 audits for anyone who may have a clue what I'm talking about.) When some CPA firm that performs one of these kinds of special audits hires a peer reviewer to come in and check them over, unless he/she has this specialized expertise, he/she ends up calling someone like me to join his peer review team and look over just that particular type of audit.

To put it into perspective, assuming TPG companies also had peer reviews performed, let's say you worked for PSA and were hired and asked to go in and perform a peer review on SGC. Well, SGC will review and grade S-74 silks, whereas PSA does not. So working at PSA you probably wouldn't know much about how the silks are graded and evaluated, so how could you be expected to review someone else grading them then? Answer, you'd call someone who is knowledgeable about S-74 silks and their grading and have them join your peer review team just to look at and report solely on the silk grading process of SGC. Makes sense, huh?

BobC

Bob- No offense, but at the risk of having to read an essay, what is your opinion? (abbreviated form)