In a hard-hitting speech to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants Tuesday, Lynn Turner said: "There's a small but growing crack in the public's confidence in us." He pointed to a recent survey which had revealed that only 42 percent of those polled found audited financial statements credible; the blame for this decline in public confidence, he said, lay with high profile financial failures and the fact that accountancy firms treated audits as a commodity rather than a core part of their business.

Turner gave his backing to the proposals -- unveiled in June by the blue ribbon Panel on Audit Effectiveness -- aimed at improving standards in auditing and governance of the auditing profession. "It is a plan that requires action now," he said, adding that the SEC would be "watching the scoreboard" to see how many of the 200-plus recommendations were actually implemented. He also gave his support to moves to strengthen the role of the Public Oversight Board as the profession's watchdog, and urged the AICPA's professional ethics committee to increase the number of lay people to a majority of its membership.

Finally, he poured scorn on plans drawn up by the AICPA and a number of other foreign accountancy bodies to create a new qualification, to be known as Cognitor. According to Dow Jones, he told journalists afterwards that the new qualification would turn the CPA into a consultant "which is a jack-of-all-trades." He added that U.S. accountants overwhelmingly opposed the concept, and advised the AICPA to abandon the idea.

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