Christina Ho Has Questions About Your Audit Bill

Auditors selling CFOs on AI might want to prepare for a follow-up question about the invoice.

Christina Ho, known for her contrarian views during her tenure on the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and now chief assurance officer at Oath CPAs, an AI-focused audit firm, has a suggestion for finance chiefs whose auditors say they are investing in AI. In a recent interview with CFO Upside, she offered a simple question to ask: “When is my fee coming down?” 

“It just doesn’t make sense for you to say you can get efficient,” Ho said, “and for the fees to not only not come down but keep going up.”

If AI can perform substantive audit work and help CPAs deliver an opinion, Ho argues, CFOs should ask how those efficiencies affect what they pay. She now has a business interest in that argument, helping build an audit model she says can deliver those savings while keeping a human accountable for the final opinion. 

Ho said Oath prices its audits 25% below traditional firms, though the savings depend on a different style of work. The firm connects directly to clients’ accounting and banking systems and document repositories to obtain records finance teams would otherwise prepare for auditors. 

The firm also tests the entire transaction population rather than relying on sampling, with work following clients’ monthly or quarterly closes instead of concentrating around year-end. Ho said AI now makes that approach feasible, allowing issues to surface earlier. 

“We want to do machine checking machine,” Ho said, with a human remaining accountable and integrated into the process.

Checking the Checker

For CFOs evaluating those promises, lower fees leave another big question unresolved: How do they measure audit quality?

Ho said her biggest concerns within Oath’s approach are AI hallucinations and automation bias, along with the tendency to accept a system’s output too readily. As plenty of accounting practitioners and community leaders have noted, a polished response can appear convincing to someone who lacks the expertise or context to recognize a mistake.

That gap changes the conversation finance chiefs should have with their auditors, Ho said. When auditors tout their AI investments, she suggested asking directly: “How do you know the AI output is correct?”

Ho’s own build-versus-buy decisions reflect how closely technology and methodology are connected. Buying software often means accepting the process embedded in it, she said. Oath is building its audit technology because she wants to redesign the methodology from the ground up, though she bought a product for the firm’s quality management system because it was faster and cheaper, with updates handled by the provider.

For CFOs weighing similar decisions, she said, evaluating software means examining the way it expects people to work. Whether that process fits the business deserves as much scrutiny as the price.

The CPA Still Counts 

Ho expects the value of human judgment to become clearer as AI becomes more widely available. “At some point, when everybody adopts AI, it’s going to become a commodity,” she said. “The differentiator is going to be human judgment.”

Oath calls its practitioners “accounting engineers,” a role combining client work and audit execution with building technology. Ho said employees who understand an accounting problem can use AI to help develop solutions, even without traditional coding skills.

The title does not change who takes responsibility for the opinion, though. Ho said the engagement partner signs it and, of course, must be a CPA. She also requires the credential for senior accounting engineers. 

She sees potential for the technology to change firm ownership, too. When asked whether individual CPAs could establish AI-powered practices on their own, Ho said Oath could conceivably offer its platform to practitioners serving their own clients, provided they used its methodology.

Her broader prediction is that AI-generated information will expand demand for assurance beyond financial statements, creating more work requiring professional judgment.

Developing that judgment becomes its own challenge when technology performs tasks that once trained junior accountants, a shift with implications for Ho’s own hiring pipeline. She wants universities to modernize their curricula and bring in practitioners with relevant technology experience, giving students opportunities to build with AI and work through practical problems alongside technology firms. 

Inside firms, she explained, young accountants need autonomy and a review process that helps them understand what happened. At Oath, employees with roughly two years of experience can work directly with clients and build tools, she said, while their work remains subject to review.

The product itself can reinforce learning by prompting employees to check particular items rather than simply accepting a completed output. Automating a task does not eliminate the opportunity to understand it, in her view.

“I don’t think it will ever be the case where you can just push a button and then be done with the audit,” Ho said.

Put It on Paper: Ho also explored the profession’s responsibilities while writing Auditing with Courage: Reimagining Assurance and Building Trust in the Age of AI, scheduled for release early next year.  She began the book while still at the PCAOB, reflecting on the challenges she faced there and on how auditors sometimes have to act against their own self-preservation instincts. “That was the reason I wrote the book, because I wanted to articulate a vision for the profession,” she said.