Opinion ID: 746746
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Auditor

Text: 27 The most prevalent category of professional qualification in the accounting profession is a license to practice as a certified public accountant, or CPA. Some states have additional categories of accounting practitioners, such as public accountants or registered accountants, who are not certified but who are otherwise licensed to offer certain types of services to the general public. D. Edward Martin, Attorney's Handbook of Accounting, Auditing and Financial Reporting § 1.01 at 1-4 (1996). Federal law permits audits of employee benefit plans and publicly traded firms to be performed either by certified public accountants or by licensed public accountants. 6 Audits of unions should in general conform to a similar standard. 28 Ferriso asserts that Hudson should be read to require that all audits be performed by CPAs. Hudson did say, in discussing whether the contributions of nonmembers must be escrowed in full while a challenge to an agency fee is pending, that [i]f, for example, the original disclosure by the Union had included a certified public accountant's verified breakdown of expenditures, including some categories that no dissenter could reasonably challenge, there would be no reason to escrow fees in these categories. 475 U.S. at 310, 106 S.Ct. at 1077. The context makes clear, however, that this reference to a certified public accountant was intended as an example, and that it is the term independent auditor that governs. 7 III. CONCLUSION 29 For the foregoing reasons, we grant Ferriso's petition for review, and remand this cause to the NLRB for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. On remand, the NLRB shall order that the Unions provide Ferriso with an independent audit of their financial data, and that the independence and qualifications of the auditors conform to prevailing norms for audits of comparable entities. 30 So ordered.