PROFESSOR SARAH WILLIAMS’S RESEARCH ON AUDITOR REGULATION IS FORTHCOMING IN UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI LAW REVIEW
June 2025 — Professor Sarah Williams has accepted an offer from University of Cincinnati Law Review to publish her manuscript, “Should We Watch the Watcher or the Watched? The Transparency Debate in Auditor Regulation.” The article, scheduled for publication in the fall of 2025, continues her exploration of how to best protect investors when regulating the accountants who audit financial statements of publicly held companies.
“Watch the Watcher or the Watched?” examines proposals by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (“PCAOB”) to regulate public company auditors by mandating that the auditors deliver to the PCAOB, for public disclosure, information about their internal operations. It describes the use of this form of transparency in other areas of securities regulation, analyzes the types of transparency contemplated by Congress in designing PCAOB oversight, and evaluates the potential success of the PCAOB’s proposals from an investor protection standpoint. The article concludes with alternative transparency approaches that might be more effective in improving public company audits.
Professor Williams previously explored the effectiveness of auditor oversight in “The Alchemy of Effective Auditor Regulation,” which considered the manner in which regulators have obtained supervisory authority over public company auditors. She then addressed criticisms about the overlapping enforcement authority of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the PCAOB in “Regulatory Personhood: The Elixir for Redundancy Between the SEC and the PCAOB.” Professor Williams also tackled the topic of political insider trading in her article, “Regulating Congressional Trading: The Rotten Egg Approach.”
Professor Sarah Williams is an Associate Professor at Penn State Dickinson Law. Her research focuses on investor protection in the area of federal securities regulation. Prior to joining Dickinson Law, Professor Williams practiced law as a securities regulator. She was Deputy Director at the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and Associate General Counsel at NASD (now FINRA). She spent several years at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, serving as staff attorney and branch chief in its Division of Enforcement, then as Counsel to SEC Commissioner Isaac C. Hunt, Jr. Professor Williams began her legal career as an associate attorney at Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C.