AUDITING

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PCAOB member Christina Ho made waves when she resigned from the audit oversight board in January 2026. A frequent dissenter, Ho, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, “voted against more potential auditing rules than anyone in the PCAOB’s two-decade history.”

Now, she’s hoping to reshape the audit profession in a different way: by joining a startup, Oath Verified, that aims to use AI to make audits more accurate, effective, and, yes, cheaper.

As a regulator, “I was very passionate about speaking about how auditing can be reimagined because of technology and how it can be made so much better,” Ho told CFO Brew. At Oath, she said, “I get to help not only build the platform but build a methodology that is foundational” to it.

Traditionally, audits are performed once a year on a small sample of a company’s financial data. Now, some firms are using automation and AI to conduct full population tests. Oath Verified’s software, Ho said, connects directly to clients’ systems, meaning auditors don’t need to go back and forth with clients to obtain documentation. It can test 100% of data and verify records in alignment with the monthly close, she added.

It’s official. Other auditing startups purport to do the same thing, but Oath Verified is not just a SaaS company; it’s also a licensed CPA firm. Ho has signed her first report and plans to sign an audit opinion later this month, she said, and is gearing up to serve clients for the FY 2026 audit season.

Ho considers herself an “accounting engineer.”—CV

      

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2027 is just around the corner, which means now is the time to plan for the year ahead.

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For finance pros looking to the future, the question isn’t about what AI can do but instead whether their systems, data, and infrastructure are properly set up for more intelligent finance ops.

Take a peek at what’s next.

COST MANAGEMENT

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As anyone who ever mistakenly bought a “What is Even Happening” triple-XL T-shirt can tell you, returns are an inevitable part of the retail business.

Last year, retailers estimated that 15.8% of their annual sales would be returned, for a total of $849.9 billion, which was in line with 2024’s returns rate of 16.9%, totaling $890 billion, according to a report from the National Retail Federation and Happy Returns, a returns software and reverse logistics company from UPS.

But CFOs need to get greater visibility into the full scope of their costs before they can rest easy about their returns strategy, one CFO told us.

“It does a lot of damage. Returns and shrink do a lot of damage to any retailer’s bottom line,” Andrew Weeks, CFO of Appriss Retail, which provides loss prevention software for retailers, told CFO Brew.

“Most retail CFOs and/or finance departments have great visibility to overall return rate, but what maybe you don’t always have visibility to is the disparate or fragmented nature of the economic impact of those returns and shrink,” he continued.

The hidden costs may be lurking in your data.—NP

      

CYBERSECURITY

Anna Kim

We have encrypted your systems. Pay $20m in Bitcoin or we will leak your data.

Some may recognize the above as the introduction to our interactive Block the Breach game. For others, that nefarious text might be a very real reminder of a time when their organization was hit by ransomware, and they had to pay a significant amount of money to bring their systems back online.

Ransomware attacks remain a huge issue. A 2025 CrowdStrike report surveying 1,100 global IT and cybersecurity leaders found that 78% of global organizations experienced a ransomware attack in the preceding 12 months.

It’s not uncommon for businesses to succumb to an attacker’s financial demands. A July Proofpoint report found that more than half (54%) of organizations surveyed across the globe paid a ransom in the past year.

But what happens after a company agrees to pay a ransom? We caught up with digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) professionals to find out.

Before paying, assess the value of the data at stake, IT Brew suggests.—BM

      

Show of hands

Should they or shouldn’t they?

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market forces

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads

Stat: 90,000. That’s how many private sector jobs were added in September, up from 36,000 the month before, according to ADP. The Dow Jones consensus forecast was 68,000. (CNBC)

Quote: “While 30,000 kind of feels like a lot—and it does in the autonomy space for sure—in terms of trucks relative to the overall market, it’s kind of pretty small. I don’t think it’s aspirational. I think we can do it.”—David Maday, CFO of autonomous vehicle tech company Aurora, on the company’s plan to produce 30,000 self-driving trucks by the end of 2030 (TechCrunch)

Read: There’s rich. And then there’s very, very rich. (The Wall Street Journal)

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Jobs

Skip the noise and cut to the jobs that matter. CollabWORK curates openings from top employers and shares them directly in trusted spaces like CFO Brew—click here to see the full list for readers like you.

• Chief Financial Officer / Controller at SERVPRO of Columbia County
• Chief Financial Officer at Northwest Arkansas Food Bank
• Chief Financial Officer at ASPIRIANT LLC
• Chief Financial Officer at Initio Capital
• Chief Financial Officer at Yoakum National Bank