The effort also made sense in the wake of adverse publicity caused by the agency's January 2000 report on PricewaterhouseCoopers partners' investments in companies they audited.

He repeated testimony from Richard Scalzo, a PricewaterhouseCoopers partner who was in charge of the company's outside audit and said he informed the audit committee of the bonuses.

The Fardella report did not identify any of the PricewaterhouseCoopers partners who had violated the rules, nor did it identify the companies whose audits were involved, because no disciplinary charges have been brought.

Mr. Fardella asked PricewaterhouseCoopers partners to review their investments over the last two years, and to report any that were not in compliance with the rules.

At a news conference in Moscow, a PricewaterhouseCoopers partner, Donn Kingsley, declined to explain the move to withdraw the opinion.

Testifying before Parliament, John Campbell, the PricewaterhouseCoopers partner who wrote the report, said regulators had approached 12 other banks about cutting similar deals.

The University of Virginia's Charlottesville campus was host to 1,000 PricewaterhouseCoopers partners for three-day sessions last summer and fall to discuss and study the Internet.

On Aug. 8, regulators barred Warren Martin, a former PricewaterhouseCoopers partner who was in charge of auditing MicroStrategy Inc., a software concern, from practicing as an accountant for a public company for at least two years.

In the case of the PricewaterhouseCoopers partner, Vault, which bills itself as an electronic water cooler, has deleted some of the messages about the partner, according to users of the board.

"We now seek to engage in discussions with S.A.I.C. as soon as possible," a PricewaterhouseCoopers partner, Tony Lomas, said.