6/4/26
My two cents, this will be music to the ears of Rita Crundwell, stole $52 M from Dixon, Il, Janet Mello, stole $107 M from US Army, Alicia Padillo, stole $294,000 from Centro, a San Antonio government operation, Rita outfoxed Dixon's auditors, my bet is on these ladies of the future not on Cristina Ho.
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Christina Ho, a dissenting voice on the U.S. audit regulator’s board in recent years, is helping form a new venture-backed accounting firm.
Ho, who left the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board in January, recently joined Oath, a new firm that aims to automate 80% of its work by 2030 as it integrates artificial-intelligence tools. She serves as chief assurance officer at the firm, which will provide auditing and advisory services, but not tax services.
“The audit approach is still built around human limitation and so in order to truly realize the benefit of technology, you have to build an audit methodology that is not human-centric but machine-centric,” Ho said.
Oath received its Certified Public Accountant license this week, meaning it can begin accepting audit clients, Ho said. The firm will audit the financial statements of private companies, with the potential to eventually expand to public companies, she said.
Chief Executive Lucas Ward, a fintech veteran who co-founded property insurance carrier Kin Insurance, conceived of Oath along with Christophe Frerebeau and Chris Pesigan, who serve as chief product officer and chief revenue officer, respectively. The trio have ties to professional services: Ward and Frerebeau met while working at Accenture, and Pesigan is a CPA and Ernst & Young alum.
Oath is targeting a Series A fundraise next year, Ward said. The firm raised $6.6 million in seed funding in December, in a round led by Rackhouse Venture Capital and including Chicago Ventures and M25.
Oath wants to become the world’s best independent verification platform for financial systems, Ward said. Its plan to automate 80% of the work would be part of that.
Ward said the percentage won’t and shouldn’t ever reach 100%. “Independent verification is, by definition, a human institution. Someone has to stand behind the work. What changes is not whether humans are involved, but what they spend their time on,” he said.
In the next decade, auditors will stand watch over systems that produce numbers continuously, he said.
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The firm is also focused on hiring “accounting engineers,” a role that blends traditional accounting knowledge with computer science and system engineering skills.
To comply with audit independence rules, the firm uses a so-called alternative practice structure. The venture capital funding goes to the nonaudit side of the business, while the auditing operation will be owned exclusively by CPAs, including Ho.
“We really believe trust systems and verification systems also need to move with the sort of speed and scope of AI,” said Kevin Novak, managing partner at Rackhouse and former head of data science at Uber Technologies.
Venture capitalists have been wading into the accounting industry following a wave of private-equity investment in accounting firms, which are looking to strengthen stable revenue streams through automation. Several AI accounting startups focused on automation and workflow have popped up, but they don’t audit company financial statements.
Ho said she was drawn to plans for a platform connecting directly to a client’s data sources, such as accounting systems and document folders, to automatically extract and match information. This allows the firm to verify records on a monthly cadence that aligns with a company’s financial close, eliminating the need for manual client schedules, she said.
Ho served as a PCAOB board member from 2021 until January this year, voting against more potential rules than anyone in its roughly two-decade history. While there, Ho opposed several major rules, saying they imposed undue burdens on auditors and deterred new entrants into the field. She also criticized the PCAOB for being slow to adopt new technology standards. The PCAOB later suspended, withdrew or delayed four rules that Ho opposed.
Ho said she pursued a startup role after leaving the PCAOB because she wasn’t interested in teaching or returning to a Big Four firm. She was a senior manager at Deloitte earlier in her career.
If Ho joined an established firm to help lead innovation efforts, the process of changing some partners’ minds about tech integration likely would have been difficult and taken a long time, she said.
“It has to be a very unique opportunity for me to want to take on a full-time role,” Ho said. “I just felt that it completely aligned with my vision for the future of audit.”
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