First, the House. Now, the Senate.

Looks like Congress is serious about this financial reform stuff, huh?

The Senate has followed the House’s lead in passing the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, a 2,300-page (!!) package of sweeping reforms that includes the emergence of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and a lot of safeguards to make sure too-big-to-fail institutions don’t get that way.

“The bill also provides for regulation of auditors of broker-dealers by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, and exempts smaller public companies with a market cap of under $75 million from Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404(b) audits of management’s assessment of internal controls,” writes WebCPA. “CPAs and tax preparers are exempted from regulation by the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, and CPAs may be called upon to assist in audits of the bureau by the Comptroller General.”

Despite those victories for the profession, though, the AICPA says more work awaits the nation’s CPAs.

“The Dodd-Frank bill authorizes regulators to issue 533 new regulations (and) agencies to conduct 60 studies and issue 94 reports,” Cynthia Lund, the AICPA’s vice president of state CPA society affairs, told CPA association leaders in a recent e-mail. “There are going to be more opportunities for the profession to provide thought leadership and help to legislators and regulators, and there’s going to be even more need for state society outreach to be sure the voice of the profession is front and center.”

The MACPA will do its part. In the meantime, here are some related resources that provide further details about the reforms:

• SEC may add 800 positions to carry out reform (from Reuters)
• CCH briefing: Exhaustive details about the financial reforms
• Milestones in the road to financial reform (from CCH)
• Now the real work on financial reform begins (from the Associated Press)
• Why the financial reform bill won’t prevent another crisis (from CNNMoney)