The Audit Committee Handbook, Fourth Edition.

The Audit Committee Handbook, Fourth Edition. By Louis Braiotta Jr. John Wiley & Sons, 428 pages. $75.

This latest edition comes five years after the third, issued in 1999--and we all know how much the state of audit committees has altered since then. Yes, the impact of the Blue Ribbon Commission was rolling through corporate suites then, but the collapse of Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom and other icons in the years since (and the subsequent passage of The Sarbanes-Oxley Act) have made service on audit committees far more demanding.

Don't look for any kind of narrative here. Braiotta, a professor of accounting in the School of Management at SUNY Binghampton and a former Ernst & Ernst accountant, has fashioned The Audit Committee Handbook into something of an encyclopedia about audit committee policies, practices and issues. It's well organized into broad headings like the planning function, monitoring and reviewing functions and the reporting function. In each of those sections are short chapters featuring specific issues, advice or analysis, such as "Meaning of Fraud in a Financial Statement Audit."

Bristling with footnotes, resources, checklists and related readings, the book also has lengthy examples of policies or charters, and analyses drawn from the author's previously published material. Some of the suggested readings date back 20 years or more, which may seem outdated, but in reality, the practices of top-notch audit committees haven't changed that much in the past few years; it's the spotlight and the potential penalties on all committees that have.