H.R. 9329 would abolish the PCAOB — the independent accounting watchdog created after Enron — by folding it into an already-deregulating SEC, while simultaneously making it harder for the SEC to write new investor-protection rules.
---
What It Does
H.R. 9329 is a seven-title omnibus bill packaged from previously separate House bills. Title I (SEC Regulatory Accountability Act) requires the SEC to formally identify the need for a rule before proposing it, assess reasonable alternatives, complete rigorous economic analysis, and conduct retrospective reviews of major rules post-implementation. Title II (SEC Transparency Act) mandates the SEC chairman testify before the House Financial Services Committee and Senate Banking Committee at least once every six months, with all commissioners required to attend at least one such hearing each year. Title III (SEC Cybersecurity Act) directs the Government Accountability Office to audit the SEC's IT infrastructure and data handling practices. Title IV (Review the Expansion of Government Act) requires the SEC to weigh the cumulative regulatory burden of its rulemaking portfolio, not just the impact of each rule in isolation. Title V (Streamlining Public Company Accounting Oversight Act) is the centerpiece: it abolishes the PCAOB two years after enactment, replacing it with an Office of Public Accounting Oversight inside the SEC's Office of the Chief Accountant. All PCAOB functions, standards, intellectual property, and employees transfer to this new office; the accounting support fee that currently funds the PCAOB ends; and any unobligated PCAOB funds go to the US Treasury. Title VI standardizes a minimum 60-day public comment window for SEC rulemaking (30 days for rules addressing imminent investor harm), with federal holidays excluded from the count. Title VII restructures the SEC's internal reporting and organizational hierarchy.
The Real Story
The core fight is over whether independent financial regulation still matters or has become a costly drag on capital markets. Republicans and their allies in the business community argue the PCAOB is a redundant post-Enron bureaucracy that duplicates SEC functions and imposes unnecessary audit burdens on public companies. Democrats and investor advocates counter that independence is the whole point — the PCAOB was deliberately kept at arm's length from the SEC because political pressure should not reach audit standards, and that stripping it now, while the SEC is simultaneously rolling back enforcement across the board, leaves investors with no real backstop.
Who Benefits
- Big Four accounting firms (Deloitte, EY, PwC, KPMG): PCAOB inspections under its prior leadership were intensifying. Absorption into a less aggressive SEC and the departure of independent oversight reduces inspection pressure and financial penalties risk.
- Smaller public companies: Lower compliance costs if audit standards become less stringent under a politically-exposed regulator.
- SEC Chair Paul Atkins: The bill expands SEC authority while eliminating an independent peer institution — a consolidation of power consistent with his stated agenda.
- House Republican caucus (particularly Financial Services Committee Chair French Hill and sponsor Ann Wagner): Fulfills a key deregulatory agenda item after the reconciliation route failed.
- Law firms and consultants specializing in SEC regulatory comment periods: a guaranteed 60-day window on every major rule creates more client opportunity to mobilize opposition.
Who Gets Hurt
- Retail investors in public companies: Independent, specialized auditing oversight disappears. The PCAOB caught material audit failures at major firms precisely because it was focused solely on this function. A generalist SEC bureau will not replicate that depth.
- International capital markets participants: Foreign investors rely on the PCAOB-audited standard as a US credibility marker. The CLS Blue Sky Blog (Columbia Law) and academics directly warned that dismantling the board risks eroding global confidence in US public company filings.
- Future Democratic administrations / future SEC leadership: The mandatory procedural gauntlet around rulemaking (cost-benefit analysis, alternatives evaluation, retrospective review) is permanently embedded in statute — it will constrain any future SEC regardless of political leadership.
- Audit quality generally: PCAOB finalized 27% fewer enforcement actions in 2025 even before this bill passes. If oversight moves to an under-resourced SEC bureau, audit discipline falls further.
- PCAOB employees offered "equivalent positions" at the SEC — a standard that has historically led to significant attrition and expertise loss in federal agency mergers.
Red Flags
- Underfunded takeover: The bill terminates the PCAOB's dedicated funding mechanism (the industry-paid accounting support fee) and transfers any unspent PCAOB funds to the U.S. Treasury — not to the SEC. The new "Office of Public Accounting Oversight" will then have to compete for SEC's existing budget at a time when the PCAOB's own budget has already been cut 9.4%. No new appropriation is provided.
- Independence erased by design: The PCAOB was created by Sarbanes-Oxley specifically to be structurally independent from the SEC and shielded from industry capture. Housing it directly inside the SEC's Office of the Chief Accountant eliminates that firewall.
- Two-year transition for a complex institution: The bill gives the PCAOB two years to wind down and transfer all standards, intellectual property, enforcement functions, and employees to the SEC. Auditing oversight for thousands of public companies must be absorbed during that window — with no interim contingency plan specified in the bill.
- Cost-benefit requirements can be litigation bait: Title I's mandatory cost-benefit and alternatives analysis requirements mirror language courts have used in the past to vacate SEC rules (see *Business Roundtable v. SEC*, 2011). Adding retrospective review of major rules gives industry a recurring procedural mechanism to challenge existing rules in court.
- Cumulative-effect review (Title IV) adds compounding delay: Requiring the SEC to weigh the cumulative burden of its entire rule portfolio before acting could freeze rulemaking during acute market events — there is no emergency exception confirmed in public summaries.
- SEC enforcement context makes this worse: The SEC already brought 27% fewer enforcement actions in FY2025 than FY2024, and 68% fewer accounting and auditing actions specifically. Adding procedural rulemaking hurdles on top of a shrinking enforcement posture compounds the gap in investor protection.
Hidden Riders
- Treasury seizure of PCAOB reserves: Rather than directing unobligated PCAOB funds to the successor office, the bill routes them to the US Treasury — effectively defunding the transition it mandates. This could leave the new SEC bureau without operational runway during the two-year switchover.
- Retrospective review as a perpetual challenge mechanism: Title I's requirement for ongoing review of already-enacted major rules is not limited to new rules. This could allow regulated entities to repeatedly petition the SEC to revisit settled regulations, creating a permanent litigation-adjacent pressure valve.
- "Equivalent positions" language in the PCAOB transfer: PCAOB employees are "offered" equivalent positions at the SEC — not guaranteed them. Civil service pay scales and SEC classification rules could result in effective pay cuts or reclassifications that drive departures of specialized audit oversight staff precisely when continuity matters most.
Current Status
H.R. 9329 was introduced in the House on June 18, 2026, by Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO), with cosponsors Troy Downing (R-MT), Pete Sessions (R-TX), Bill Huizenga (R-MI), and Young Kim (R-CA). The House Financial Services Committee held a markup on June 30, 2026 and approved the bill — amended — by a vote of 28 to 23, largely along party lines, under Chairman French Hill. The committee formally reported the bill to the full House on September 3, 2026 (H. Rept. 119-794). It is now waiting to be scheduled for a floor vote before the full House of Representatives. If it clears the House, it would go to the Senate, where it has no confirmed companion bill and would face the 60-vote filibuster threshold — the same obstacle that blocked its predecessor, H.R. 8339, which passed the House Financial Services Committee in the 118th Congress but never received a Senate floor vote.
---
Sources:
- [H.R.9329 — Congress.gov](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/9329)
- [H.R. 9329 (RH) — GovInfo](https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/BILLS-119hr9329rh)
- [Wagner Introduces SEC Reform Package — Congresswoman Ann Wagner](https://wagner.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/wagner-introduces-sec-reform-package)
- [SEC legislative package led by Wagner — Ripon Advance](https://riponadvance.com/stories/sec-legislative-package-led-by-wagner-offers-numerous-reforms/)
- [House Committee Votes to Abolish PCAOB — Winston & Strawn](https://www.winston.com/en/blogs-and-podcasts/capital-markets-and-securities-law-watch/house-committee-votes-to-abolish-public-company-accounting-oversight-board)
- [Shadow SEC: PCAOB Should Not Be Hastily Abolished — CLS Blue Sky Blog](https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2025/05/14/shadow-sec-the-pcaob-should-be-carefully-reviewed-not-hastily-abolished/)
- [Draft bill would eliminate PCAOB — Accounting Today](https://www.accountingtoday.com/news/draft-bill-would-eliminate-pcaob-empower-sec)
- [Will Congress dissolve the PCAOB? — Rehmann](https://www.rehmann.com/resource/will-congress-dissolve-the-public-company-accounting-oversight-board-pcaob/)
- [AICPA responds to draft PCAOB bill — The Accountant Online](https://www.theaccountant-online.com/news/aicpa-pcaob-shift-duties-sec/)
- [SEC Enforcement FY2025 Results — SEC.gov](https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2026-34)
- [SEC Enforcement 2025 Year in Review — Harvard Law](https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2026/01/21/sec-enforcement-2025-year-in-review/)
- [SEC and PCAOB Enforcement Plummets — CPA Practice Advisor](https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/2026/03/04/sec-and-pcaob-enforcement-plummets/179232/)
- [House Panel Moves Bills to Curb Class Actions, Revamp SEC — Bloomberg Tax](https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report-international/house-panel-moves-bills-to-curb-some-class-actions-revamp-sec)
- [H. Rept. 118-782 — SEC Reform and Restructuring Act (118th Congress)](https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/118th-congress/house-report/782/1)
H.R. 9329 would abolish the PCAOB — the independent accounting watchdog created after Enron — by folding it into an already-deregulating SEC, while simultaneously making it harder for the SEC to write new investor-protection rules.
---
Why now
Republicans in the 119th Congress entered 2025 with a deregulatory mandate, and Project 2025 specifically called for PCAOB abolition. An earlier attempt to dissolve the PCAOB through budget reconciliation (the "Big Beautiful Bill") was struck down under the Byrd Rule in 2025, forcing Republicans to pursue a standalone legislative path. Meanwhile, under SEC Chair Paul Atkins, total SEC enforcement settlements fell to $808 million in FY2025 — down 45% from FY2024 — and the SEC-approved PCAOB budget was already cut 9.4% for 2026, giving supporters political momentum to argue the board is redundant and ripe for consolidation.
The real story
The core fight is over whether independent financial regulation still matters or has become a costly drag on capital markets. Republicans and their allies in the business community argue the PCAOB is a redundant post-Enron bureaucracy that duplicates SEC functions and imposes unnecessary audit burdens on public companies. Democrats and investor advocates counter that independence is the whole point — the PCAOB was deliberately kept at arm's length from the SEC because political pressure should not reach audit standards, and that stripping it now, while the SEC is simultaneously rolling back enforcement across the board, leaves investors with no real backstop.
Red flags
▸ Underfunded takeover: The bill terminates the PCAOB's dedicated funding mechanism (the industry-paid accounting support fee) and transfers any unspent PCAOB funds to the U.S. Treasury — not to the SEC. The new "Office of Public Accounting Oversight" will then have to compete for SEC's existing budget at a time when the PCAOB's own budget has already been cut 9.4%. No new appropriation is provided.
▸ Independence erased by design: The PCAOB was created by Sarbanes-Oxley specifically to be structurally independent from the SEC and shielded from industry capture. Housing it directly inside the SEC's Office of the Chief Accountant eliminates that firewall.
▸ Two-year transition for a complex institution: The bill gives the PCAOB two years to wind down and transfer all standards, intellectual property, enforcement functions, and employees to the SEC. Auditing oversight for thousands of public companies must be absorbed during that window — with no interim contingency plan specified in the bill.
▸ Cost-benefit requirements can be litigation bait: Title I's mandatory cost-benefit and alternatives analysis requirements mirror language courts have used in the past to vacate SEC rules (see *Business Roundtable v. SEC*, 2011). Adding retrospective review of major rules gives industry a recurring procedural mechanism to challenge existing rules in court.
▸ Cumulative-effect review (Title IV) adds compounding delay: Requiring the SEC to weigh the cumulative burden of its entire rule portfolio before acting could freeze rulemaking during acute market events — there is no emergency exception confirmed in public summaries.
▸ SEC enforcement context makes this worse: The SEC already brought 27% fewer enforcement actions in FY2025 than FY2024, and 68% fewer accounting and auditing actions specifically. Adding procedural rulemaking hurdles on top of a shrinking enforcement posture compounds the gap in investor protection.
Who benefits
• Big Four accounting firms (Deloitte, EY, PwC, KPMG): PCAOB inspections under its prior leadership were intensifying. Absorption into a less aggressive SEC and the departure of independent oversight reduces inspection pressure and financial penalties risk.
• Smaller public companies: Lower compliance costs if audit standards become less stringent under a politically-exposed regulator.
• SEC Chair Paul Atkins: The bill expands SEC authority while eliminating an independent peer institution — a consolidation of power consistent with his stated agenda.
• House Republican caucus (particularly Financial Services Committee Chair French Hill and sponsor Ann Wagner): Fulfills a key deregulatory agenda item after the reconciliation route failed.
• Law firms and consultants specializing in SEC regulatory comment periods: a guaranteed 60-day window on every major rule creates more client opportunity to mobilize opposition.
Who gets hurt
• Retail investors in public companies: Independent, specialized auditing oversight disappears. The PCAOB caught material audit failures at major firms precisely because it was focused solely on this function. A generalist SEC bureau will not replicate that depth.
• International capital markets participants: Foreign investors rely on the PCAOB-audited standard as a US credibility marker. The CLS Blue Sky Blog (Columbia Law) and academics directly warned that dismantling the board risks eroding global confidence in US public company filings.
• Future Democratic administrations / future SEC leadership: The mandatory procedural gauntlet around rulemaking (cost-benefit analysis, alternatives evaluation, retrospective review) is permanently embedded in statute — it will constrain any future SEC regardless of political leadership.
• Audit quality generally: PCAOB finalized 27% fewer enforcement actions in 2025 even before this bill passes. If oversight moves to an under-resourced SEC bureau, audit discipline falls further.
• PCAOB employees offered "equivalent positions" at the SEC — a standard that has historically led to significant attrition and expertise loss in federal agency mergers.
What it does
H.R. 9329 is a seven-title omnibus bill packaged from previously separate House bills. Title I (SEC Regulatory Accountability Act) requires the SEC to formally identify the need for a rule before proposing it, assess reasonable alternatives, complete rigorous economic analysis, and conduct retrospective reviews of major rules post-implementation. Title II (SEC Transparency Act) mandates the SEC chairman testify before the House Financial Services Committee and Senate Banking Committee at least once every six months, with all commissioners required to attend at least one such hearing each year. Title III (SEC Cybersecurity Act) directs the Government Accountability Office to audit the SEC's IT infrastructure and data handling practices. Title IV (Review the Expansion of Government Act) requires the SEC to weigh the cumulative regulatory burden of its rulemaking portfolio, not just the impact of each rule in isolation. Title V (Streamlining Public Company Accounting Oversight Act) is the centerpiece: it abolishes the PCAOB two years after enactment, replacing it with an Office of Public Accounting Oversight inside the SEC's Office of the Chief Accountant. All PCAOB functions, standards, intellectual property, and employees transfer to this new office; the accounting support fee that currently funds the PCAOB ends; and any unobligated PCAOB funds go to the US Treasury. Title VI standardizes a minimum 60-day public comment window for SEC rulemaking (30 days for rules addressing imminent investor harm), with federal holidays excluded from the count. Title VII restructures the SEC's internal reporting and organizational hierarchy.
Hidden riders
- Treasury seizure of PCAOB reserves: Rather than directing unobligated PCAOB funds to the successor office, the bill routes them to the US Treasury — effectively defunding the transition it mandates. This could leave the new SEC bureau without operational runway during the two-year switchover.
- Retrospective review as a perpetual challenge mechanism: Title I's requirement for ongoing review of already-enacted major rules is not limited to new rules. This could allow regulated entities to repeatedly petition the SEC to revisit settled regulations, creating a permanent litigation-adjacent pressure valve.
- "Equivalent positions" language in the PCAOB transfer: PCAOB employees are "offered" equivalent positions at the SEC — not guaranteed them. Civil service pay scales and SEC classification rules could result in effective pay cuts or reclassifications that drive departures of specialized audit oversight staff precisely when continuity matters most.
Precedent
The PCAOB was created by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 in direct response to the Enron and WorldCom accounting fraud scandals, in which the pre-existing self-regulatory model — where the accounting industry largely policed itself under loose SEC supervision — failed catastrophically and wiped out billions in investor savings. The current bill reverses that structural lesson. The IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998 is a useful analog: that reorganization of a major financial regulator was well-intentioned, but caused years of operational turbulence, enforcement gaps, and expertise loss. The EU's experience is also instructive — European national audit oversight bodies that lack independence from their host regulators have been consistently criticized by international standards bodies for weaker inspection outcomes than the PCAOB model.
Current status
H.R. 9329 was introduced in the House on June 18, 2026, by Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO), with cosponsors Troy Downing (R-MT), Pete Sessions (R-TX), Bill Huizenga (R-MI), and Young Kim (R-CA). The House Financial Services Committee held a markup on June 30, 2026 and approved the bill — amended — by a vote of 28 to 23, largely along party lines, under Chairman French Hill. The committee formally reported the bill to the full House on September 3, 2026 (H. Rept. 119-794). It is now waiting to be scheduled for a floor vote before the full House of Representatives. If it clears the House, it would go to the Senate, where it has no confirmed companion bill and would face the 60-vote filibuster threshold — the same obstacle that blocked its predecessor, H.R. 8339, which passed the House Financial Services Committee in the 118th Congress but never received a Senate floor vote.
---
Sources:
- [H.R.9329 — Congress.gov](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/9329)
- [H.R. 9329 (RH) — GovInfo](https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/BILLS-119hr9329rh)
- [Wagner Introduces SEC Reform Package — Congresswoman Ann Wagner](https://wagner.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/wagner-introduces-sec-reform-package)
- [SEC legislative package led by Wagner — Ripon Advance](https://riponadvance.com/stories/sec-legislative-package-led-by-wagner-offers-numerous-reforms/)
- [House Committee Votes to Abolish PCAOB — Winston & Strawn](https://www.winston.com/en/blogs-and-podcasts/capital-markets-and-securities-law-watch/house-committee-votes-to-abolish-public-company-accounting-oversight-board)
- [Shadow SEC: PCAOB Should Not Be Hastily Abolished — CLS Blue Sky Blog](https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2025/05/14/shadow-sec-the-pcaob-should-be-carefully-reviewed-not-hastily-abolished/)
- [Draft bill would eliminate PCAOB — Accounting Today](https://www.accountingtoday.com/news/draft-bill-would-eliminate-pcaob-empower-sec)
- [Will Congress dissolve the PCAOB? — Rehmann](https://www.rehmann.com/resource/will-congress-dissolve-the-public-company-accounting-oversight-board-pcaob/)
- [AICPA responds to draft PCAOB bill — The Accountant Online](https://www.theaccountant-online.com/news/aicpa-pcaob-shift-duties-sec/)
- [SEC Enforcement FY2025 Results — SEC.gov](https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2026-34)
- [SEC Enforcement 2025 Year in Review — Harvard Law](https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2026/01/21/sec-enforcement-2025-year-in-review/)
- [SEC and PCAOB Enforcement Plummets — CPA Practice Advisor](https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/2026/03/04/sec-and-pcaob-enforcement-plummets/179232/)
- [House Panel Moves Bills to Curb Class Actions, Revamp SEC — Bloomberg Tax](https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report-international/house-panel-moves-bills-to-curb-some-class-actions-revamp-sec)
- [H. Rept. 118-782 — SEC Reform and Restructuring Act (118th Congress)](https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/118th-congress/house-report/782/1)
What to watch
As of September 2026, the bill is waiting for a full House floor vote; the Republican majority can likely pass it, but the Senate is the real hurdle — there is no confirmed Senate companion bill, and the 60-vote filibuster threshold means Republicans would need Democratic votes or another reconciliation vehicle. If the bill stalls in the Senate (as its predecessor H.R. 8339 did in the 118th Congress), watch for the same outcome to be pursued administratively: further PCAOB budget cuts, continued leadership stacking with industry-friendly appointees, and reduced enforcement. Citizens concerned about audit independence should contact members of the Senate Banking Committee, which would be the first Senate stop for this legislation.
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