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The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (or PCAOB) (sometimes called "Peekaboo") is a private-sector, non-profit corporation created by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a 2002 United States federal law, to oversee the auditors of public companies. Its stated purpose is to 'protect the interests of investors and further the public interest in the preparation of informative, fair, and independent audit reports'. Although a private entity, the PCAOB has many government-like regulatory functions, making it in some ways similar to the private Self Regulatory Organizations (SROs) that regulate stock markets and other aspects of the financial markets in the United States.

The PCAOB has five members, including its chairman, each of whom are appointed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Two members of the PCAOB (and only two members) must be or have been a certified public accountant. However, if the chairman of the PCAOB is one of those two members, he or she may not have been a practicing certified public accountant for at least five years prior to being appointed to the Board. Each PCAOB member serves full-time, for staggered five-year terms. The salary of the PCAOB's chairman is currently $556,000 per year, while the salaries of other board members are $452,000 annually. The Board's annual budget of approximately $100 million, which must be approved by the SEC each year, is funded by fees paid by U.S. issuers. The organization has a staff of over 300, and its headquarters is in Washington, D.C. The PCAOB's immediate past chairman is the former New York Federal Reserve president, William J. McDonough. The Board's current Chairman is Mark Olson, a former Federal Reserve Board governor.

Under Section 101 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the PCAOB has the power to

Part of the PCAOB's power to set rules of the auditing industry includes the power to regulate the non-audit services that audit firms may offer their audit clients (such as consulting or tax services). This power was given to the PCAOB as a result of allegations, in cases such as Enron and Worldcom, that auditors' independence from their clients' managers had been compromised because of the large fees that audit firms were earning from these ancillary services.

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