Sarbanes-Oxley has ushered in better accounting and financial control practices at many firms. Witness the reduction in restated earnings over the year among big companies. But as recent events have made clear, Sarbanes-Oxley did not prevent the Lehman Brothers meltdown, which was enabled to some degree by Ernst & Young's lax auditing of Lehman's books. To many, this has revived the ghost of Arthur Andersen, which was dealt the death penalty for its shoddy work in the Enron blow-up.

But Sarbanes-Oxley wasn't financial industry-specific. The "financial industry may be too complex and too subject to opinions for the accountants to get right, even if they want to," notes a New York Times commentary. "Witness PricewaterhouseCoopers, which audited both Goldman Sachs and AIG. At the height of the financial crisis, the exact same securities on each firms' books were valued at radically different prices. In other words, there was no way to compare the two firms' results. The complexity makes the accountants even more susceptible to pressure from management. That pressure is all too real."

So, when it comes to financial services auditing, what ought to be done? It may be that more precise standards need to be set, standards that keep pace with the stream of new products and securities. It's a good sign that the PCAOB will take on auditors of financial firms, but is it up to the task? What do you think is the proper solution?

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