Samantha Ross

Bio

Samantha Ross is an Affiliated Scholar with the Center for Innovation. She is the Founder of AssuranceMark, the Investors Consortium for Assurance, which she established to promote investors’ interest in high-quality, reliable reporting and assurance on material disclosures beyond the financial statements. She is also on the board of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, North America.

Previously, she was one of the founding staff of the U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and helped build it from the ground up for its first 15 years. She contributed to building the world’s largest and most respected audit oversight institution and achieving long-term positive change to make audits more transparent and relevant to investors.

Among other things, she provided strategic support to the Board and its standard setting staff in connection with developing new auditing standards on a number of topics, including auditor independence, modernization of the auditor’s reporting model, and a rule on audit transparency, providing for disclosure of engagement partners and other firms that participate in audits.  She was also involved in the agency’s investor outreach and interaction with the Congress, including through testimony on behalf of the PCAOB, and development of the agency’s Center for Economic Analysis to enhance study of the role of the audit in capital markets.

Prior to the PCAOB, she worked at the SEC, as special counsel to the chief accountant of the Division of Enforcement, to help implement the SEC’s financial fraud priority as well as Enron-era reforms, including the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002.

Before the SEC she practiced law at a private law firm and was a law clerk to the Hon. John E. Sprizzo in the U.S. district court for the Southern District of New York.