It isn't pretty. According to Charles Niemeier, who is interim chairman until new nominee William McDonough is installed, said that large corporations such as Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) and General Electric (NYSE: GE) may pay as much as $1 million each.

Part of what they will be paying for are salaries for the board members upwards of $500,000, more than the President of the U.S. receives, as well as Supreme Court Justices and perhaps more ironically, members of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which recently has been pressing for better corporate governance, especially as it relates to executive salaries and perks.

The board has also decided to give the Auditing Standards Board, a part of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the boot. From here on, it said, PCAOB will be setting all auditing rules and standards in the U.S.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act provided that the PCAOB could have continued to leave the industry's peer program in place and simply approve or disapprove proposed rules, much the way the NASD regulates its exchange listees in collaboration with the SEC.

"A lot of what we did today is simply what Congress intended as a consequence of this statute," Daniel Goelzer, one of the board members reportedly told Reuters in an interview. "I do think part of what Congress felt was needed to restore confidence in the auditing profession was to have an independent body, not have the practitioners themselves setting the standards."

The decision pretty much leaves the AICPA, once a powerful organization whose power brokers were often saluted as they waltzed down the corridors of the Capitol, as a trade association, providing networking, education and social benefits to its members. Its lobbying now will be limited to the PCAOB.

By the fall, the board intends to set up an advisory group of from 15 to 30 accountants and other experts to help it set the auditing rules.

Some in the industry still believe Sarbanes-Oxley went to far, providing for what amounts to a taxation on publicly-traded companies, when the board could have simply become part of the SEC, and federally funded. However, during the period it was being set up, the SEC chair was Harvey Pitt, Jr., and lawmakers appeared simply not to trust him to do the job.