A member of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board is calling on his fellow board members to get serious about converging public company auditing standards with international standards and those for private organizations in the United States.

PCAOB member Bill Gradison is in Denver today to address the Colorado Society of CPAs with his call for convergence. According to his prepared remarks, Gradison will say the current international financial crisis spotlights an important imperative for regulators and rule makers—the need for coordinated actions. “More specifically, the recent focus on fair-value accounting has demonstrated that standard setters on both sides of the Atlantic are well aware of the necessity of speaking with a single voice,” he plans to say.

The PCAOB writes auditing standards for companies doing business in U.S. capital markets, but some 100 countries around the world follow International Auditing Standards, written by the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board, or national variations of ISAs. In addition, private entities in the United States follow standards written by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, which has followed a path in recent years to make its rules more consistent with the ISAs.

“Put me down as skeptical that in the long run it will be practical to educate, test, and supervise auditors in three different complex sets of auditing standards,” Gradison’s text says. “The challenge is for the three standard setters to develop a road map—a systematic, joint, comprehensive standard-by-standard review, identifying and merging the highest quality aspects of each standard.”

The IAASB has said it would welcome the PCAOB to look more closely at its standards and develop a convergence objective, although the PCAOB’s rule on auditing internal control over financial reporting stands out as a clear, major difference that countries abroad have not chosen to embrace. PCAOB member Charles Niemeier also has pointed out that he would not support converging to international standards in part because they are written by auditors themselves. The IAASB is an arm of the International Federation of Accountants, which is a professional accounting association, not an independent regulatory body.

In a September speech to the New York Society of CPAs, Niemeier said he sees no “beneficial policy objective” in allowing auditors to write their own standards, nor does he see a need for comparability in auditing standards as the case is made for comparability in financial reporting or accounting standards.

Gradison says none of the three sets of standards can be regarded as superior in all respects, but the best of each can be drawn into a single, global standard. He also believes convergence of auditing standards would not involve as steep a learning curve because they apply only to auditors and could ultimately make auditing more efficient. He’s calling on the PCAOB to adopt a convergence roadmap and timetable as part of its strategic plan.

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