The enterprise risk committee, for example, “oversees management’s responsibilities to identify, manage and plan for material risks including market risk (which includes interest rate risk), liquidity risk, operational risk and reputational risk, as well as capital management.” Susan S. Bies, a former governor of the Federal Reserve System, also serves on this committee, as does Jack O. Bovender Jr., a former chairman of HCA, the for-profit hospital operator; Thomas J. May, chairman and chief executive of Northeast Utilities; and Clayton S. Rose, a Harvard Business School professor and former senior executive at JPMorgan Chase.

Image Brian T. Moynihan, Bank of America’s C.E.O., received total compensation of $13.1 million last year. Credit... Bobby Yip/Reuters

Those are some pretty heady résumés. “One look at the proxy and all those recitations and you’d think, ‘They really have their eye on the ball,’ ” said Brian T. Foley, a compensation consultant in White Plains. “Then you see this $4 billion thing go rolling by. It’s a little disconcerting, when armed with 10 fingers and 10 toes, you can miss a number like that.”

Jerome F. Dubrowski, a Bank of America spokesman, declined to make the directors available for comment. But in an interview, he emphasized that the bank, not an outside regulator or auditor, had identified the error; he said the board was actively reviewing the bank’s control processes.

Nevertheless, the $4 billion miss raises some questions for Bank of America’s management and its directors:

Does the accounting mistake indicate that Bank of America is too big to manage?

Mr. Dubrowski said no, suggesting that the error could just as easily have happened at a smaller bank. Since 2010, he added, bank management has worked to streamline the company and to reduce complexity. “We have shed $70 billion in noncore assets and reduced the number of legal entities by 36 percent,” he said.

While he said the board and management were working to ensure that such a problem wouldn’t crop up again, shareholders ought to know the specifics of what is being done to remedy the dysfunctional reporting system in the bank that allowed this error to grow undetected for five years.

Why should shareholders vote for the reappointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers as auditor, as the company urges?

One job of an auditor is to ferret out errors, not to miss them, and PwC was paid $94 million last year to do just that. How can shareholders be confident that other disasters are not lurking in Bank of America’s books? (PwC declined to comment.)