To accomplish the goal of protecting investors, financial reporting also must maintain a high standard of credibility. The auditing profession, as an independent overseer of compliance with financial reporting standards, plays a crucial role in preserving the integrity of financial reporting. The Commission's concern for the independence of the auditing function really is quite basic and straightforward. The essential public purpose of the independent audit is to build trust and confidence in our capital markets by providing comfort to investors that the information they receive from companies can be trusted to reveal what should be revealed. The Commission's perspective reflects a fundamental, underlying belief that the success of our markets, the deepest and most liquid in the world, rests on maintaining and enhancing investor confidence.
Investment decisions made in a vacuum are gambles.
Informed investment decisions require decision-useful financial information, and highly reliable information is more useful to investors than information of uncertain believability. By adding credibility to the information provided by companies coming into capital markets, the auditing profession supports more informed investment decisions and, thereby, protects investors. Maintaining investor confidence in the independence of the audit process is a more complex issue and one that gives rise to perplexing new questions for the Commission and the auditing profession with each passing year. It is an issue that has many dimensions. It is critical, of course, that information provided to investors be, in fact, reliable.