WASHINGTON — An accounting oversight board agreed on Tuesday to seek public comment on whether companies should be required to change their auditors every few years, a move that supporters say they believe would strengthen the independence and objectivity of accountants that inspect corporate ledgers for accuracy.

The regulatory body, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, voted unanimously to seek comment over the next four months on a concept known as mandatory audit firm rotation. The practice would limit the number of consecutive years that an accounting firm could audit the books of a publicly traded company.

The proposal is the third significant measure that the accounting board, created in 2002 as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, has begun to examine in an effort to give investors greater certainty that auditors are in fact doing their job — something that was not always clear after the 2008 financial crisis, the Enron collapse and other recent accounting failures.

“The reason to consider auditor term limits is that they may reduce the pressure auditors face to develop and protect long-term client relationships to the detriment of investors and our capital markets,” said James R. Doty, the chairman of accounting oversight board and an advocate of the idea.