Samantha Ross

Samantha Ross is the Founder of AssuranceMark, the Investors Consortium for Assurance, which she established to promote investors’ interest in high-quality, reliable reporting and assurance on material disclosures beyond the financial statements. She is also an Affiliated Scholar at UC Hastings Law School and serves on the board of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, North America.

Samantha is a frequent speaker at conferences on capital markets, corporate governance, corporate reporting, sustainability reporting, securities regulation, investor protection, and other topics. She has also published articles, reports and letters on these topics, including in Pensions & Investments, Barron’s, and the Financial Times. She also recently testified before the U.S. House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Investor Protection, Entrepreneurship, and Capital Markets on “Taking Stock of ‘China, Inc.’: Examining Risks to Investors and the U.S. Posed by Foreign Issuers in U.S. Market.”

Previously, she was one of the founding staff of the U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and helped build it from the ground up for its first 15 years. She contributed to building the world’s largest and most respected audit oversight institution and achieving long-term positive change to make audits more transparent and relevant to capital market needs.

Among other things, she helped the Board develop new auditing standards on a number of topics, including auditor independence, modernization of the auditor’s reporting model, and audit transparency. She was also involved in the agency’s investor outreach and interaction with the Congress, including through testimony on behalf of the PCAOB, and development of the agency’s Center for Economic Analysis to enhance study of the role of the audit in capital markets.

Prior to the PCAOB, she worked at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, as special counsel to the chief accountant of the Division of Enforcement, where she helped implement the SEC’s financial reporting priorities as well as Enron-era reforms, including the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002.

Before the SEC, she practiced law at a private law firm and was a law clerk in the U.S. district court for the Southern District of New York.