Bill Edge has returned to the role that he held almost 20 years ago with his recent appointment as the full time chair of the Auditing and Assurance Standards Board.
Edge is a former partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers and was most recently chairman of the Financial Reporting Council but the resignation late last year of then chairman, Professor Roger Simnett, created a vacancy.
The FRC decided to do some shuffling and Edge became the acting chairman of the AUASB while the government looked at a replacement for Simnett.
This return to the chairmanship of the audit standard setter puts Edge in familiar, comfortable waters. He was the chairman of the accounting profession’s auditing standard setter before that body was incorporated into the public sector after Enron belly-flopped and Anderson ceased to exist following a series of scandals in the United States.
A little-known fact about Edge is that he was involved in a major research exercise in the early 1990s called the Expectation Gap report, which was designed to rattle the cages of the accounting profession
He was one of a team looking for ways in which the accounting profession could improve the way it serves the public interest.
One of the initiatives that emerged from that particular report was the creation of an interpretation body called the Urgent Issues Group.
The UIG was dissolved once Australia adopted international accounting standards and key interpretation decisions were being made by the board based in London.