AICPA offers to help SEC Crypto Task Force

The American Institute of CPAs is volunteering to provide its assistance to the Securities and Exchange Commission's recently established Crypto Task Force in light of its own efforts in the digital assets space.

The SEC created the Crypto Task Force in January, naming SEC commissioner Hester Peirce to lead the task force. The SEC promises to become much more friendly to the crypto industry under its new chairman, Paul Atkins, who was sworn in last week, than its previous leader, Gary Gensler, who had cracked down on industry abuses. Peirce asked for public input in February, and in response the AICPA submitted a comment letter in which it discussed its own work in the digital assets field and offered to serve as a resource throughout the SEC's project.

The AICPA pointed to the Blockchain in Accounting Symposium that it hosted with its CPA.com unit in 2018 and the Digital Assets Working Group it set up in 2019 as a joint project of its Financial Reporting Executive Committee and Assurance Services Executives Committee. The working group includes an Accounting Subgroup, Auditing Subgroup and Attestation Subgroup that are developing guidance for practitioners. 

In March, the AICPA published the 2025 Criteria for Stablecoin Reporting: Specific to Asset-Backed Fiat-Pegged Tokens, and is developing further criteria for controls supporting stablecoin operations to ensure they're reliable and trustworthy. 

"Given our extensive experience over seven years working in the digital assets and blockchain space, we are well-positioned to assist the Crypto Task Force with its objective to bring greater clarity to digital assets, offering valuable perspectives and proposing solutions to the challenges they are addressing," Susan Coffey, the AICPA's CEO of public accounting, wrote in response last week to the task force.