Claudius Modesti, Director of Enforcement and Investigations with the Public Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) in Washington, D.C., will deliver the 2006-07 George R. Husband Lecture at 2:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 25, in the McGregor Memorial Conference Center on the campus of Wayne State University. The topic will be "Thoughts on Deterring Auditor Misconduct in the Post-Enron World."

The PCAOB is a private-sector, non-profit corporation, created by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. Its mission is to oversee the auditors of public companies in order to protect the interests of investors and further the public interest in the preparation of informative, fair, and independent audit reports.

Modesti joined the PCAOB staff in May 2004 as director of enforcement and investigations. Previously, he was an assistant United States attorney for the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, where he led the investigation and prosecution of white-collar crimes with an emphasis on securities fraud. He was also appointed corporate fraud coordinator for the office.

Prior to joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Modesti served as a trial attorney for the Department of Justice, Criminal Division, and spent four years in the Division of Enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission. He earned his J.D. degree, magna cum laude, from the Georgetown University Law Center, and his Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service degree from Georgetown University.

The George R. Husband Lecture is convened annually by the Wayne State University School of Business Administration. Husband was an accounting educator and a leader in his field. His former students and admirers thought so highly of him that they endowed a professorship, scholarship, and annual Distinguished Lecture Series in his memory nearly 40 years after his untimely death in 1958.

The program is open to the public at no charge. For more information, call 313-577-4500.