Mary Jo White is Chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This post is based on Chair White’s recent Keynote Address at the 2015 AICPA National Conference; the full text, including footnotes, is available here. The views expressed in this post are those of Chair White and do not necessarily reflect those of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the other Commissioners, or the Staff.
It is a pleasure to be here to speak to you about our shared and weighty responsibility to maintain high-quality, reliable financial reporting. This audience—preparers, auditors, audit committee members, and their advisors—is a very important one for the SEC. Investors, issuers, and the markets all depend on the work you do and the judgments you make—and how well you do both. You, together with the standard setters and the regulators, have a vital stake in ensuring that our capital markets remain the safest and strongest in the world—and we all share the responsibility.
Key to our mutual success is maintaining high-quality reporting of reliable and relevant financial information that investors can use to make informed investment decisions. If there is even one weak link in the financial reporting chain, investors and the integrity of our markets suffer. We must all work together in order to fulfill the high expectations investors rightly set for financial reporting.