Good for the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Its Auditing Standards Board has issued a new guidance standard to help U.S. accountants detect fraud in the financial statements they audit.

The new standard “reminds auditors that they must approach every audit with professional skepticism and not assume that management is honest,” said the institute’s president and CEO, Barry Melancon. The advisory tells auditors to warn management about the risks of fraud and the “ability to rationalize.” Employees should be encouraged to “blow the whistle.” Auditing tests should be “unpredictable and unexpected by the client.”

Sounds almost like guerrilla warfare, doesn’t it? The auditors against the top management in suites and board rooms. Good, harsh advice, but it raises some questions. Why so late? If the top level at Arthur Andersen and others of the “Big Five” auditing firms had heeded that advice they might not be facing the current lawsuits, investigations and prosecutions for participation in corporate fraud. Arthur Andersen might have had the sense to stay out of bed with the folks at Enron, where a spectacular collapse touched off the present torrent of collapses and bankruptcies.

Why now? In a system where success is measured solely by money, questions are raised not on the upside but only when the profits turn to loss. And does the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants really mean it? A former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission says in his new book, “Take on the Street,” that the institute “has neither served the public nor its own members well” and “has done its members a disservice in its role as a trade group by impeding reforms.”

He says it has rarely disciplined accountants. He goes on: “No Big Five firm has ever failed a peer review by one of the other Big Five firms, even though such peer reviews are the industry’s main way of ensuring the quality of audits. And despite evidence of auditor misbehavior, the AICPA has stubbornly resisted change.”

Harsh words, indeed, and in fairness other professionals, such as doctors and lawyers, might review their own standards of ethics and conduct to ensure they are measured by public interest in addition to personal interest or the interests of patient and client.

A test of the accounting institute is in progress right now. Will it support those who want to see a strong and independent figure appointed to head the new accounting oversight board created by statute as a corrective to the accounting scandals? Or will it back a softie who may talk some tough talk but will actually work for business as usual?