Accounting reform occurred after significant corporate misconduct was discovered in the early 1980s. Some of the reform sought to require public companies to put the hiring and pay of their auditors in the hands of an independent audit board committee. There has been concern that management still has significant influence on the evaluation and final decisions. Phillip Lamoreaux, an accounting professor at Arizona State University, conducted a study of more than 2,000 auditor changes in publicly traded companies. He found that companies whose top executives had worked with a Big Four accounting firm were twice as likely to select that firm. Many executives make their way into corporate America through the largest accounting firms in the world. A chief accountant in the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) stated that auditor independence is "critical to the integrity of the whole process