In response to stakeholders—including members of its Investor Advisory Group and Standards and Emerging Issues Advisory Group—who expressed interest in having more access to Public Company Accounting Oversight Board data in machine-readable formats, the PCAOB said on April 28 that new downloadable datasets related to its audit firm inspection reports are now available.
Found on the regulator’s Firm Inspection Reports page, the new datasets contain information gleaned from inspection reports of PCAOB-registered accounting firms going back to 2018. Prior to yesterday, this information was only available in the individual PDF versions of firm inspection reports released by the PCAOB.
- Related article: Want to Search PCAOB Inspection Reports By How Many Screw-Ups an Audit Firm Made? You Can Now Do That
“PCAOB inspection reports have always been a data-rich resource for investors and others,” PCAOB Chair Erica Williams said in a statement. “With the release of these downloadable datasets, we are continuing our efforts to drive audit quality by increasing transparency.”
The two new datasets, which are available in three formats—CSV, XML, and JSON—contain information from Part I.A and Part I.B of PCAOB inspection reports for use in different applications (like Excel), platforms, or systems. Year-by-year information in these datasets goes back to 2018 for annually inspected firms (accounting firms that audit more than 100 public companies) and 2019 for triennially inspected firms and will be updated on a quarterly basis in the future.
Part I.A of PCAOB inspection reports discusses deficiencies that were of such significance that PCAOB staff believes the audit firm, at the time it issued its audit report(s), hadn’t obtained sufficient appropriate audit evidence to support its opinion on the public company’s financial statements and/or internal control over financial reporting. The Part I.A dataset provides the entire description of each Part I.A deficiency and also includes the following attributes related to those errors:
- Issuer reference key tying the deficiency shown in the dataset to the issuer as shown in Part I.A. of the inspection report (Each issuer is identified by a letter in Part I.A.– e.g., “Issuer A.”)
- Indicator of whether the firm was the principal auditor or played a role but was not the principal auditor.
- Audits affected by the deficiencies identified in Part I.A (i.e., financial statement audit and/or the ICFR audit).
- Classification of audits with Part I.A deficiencies (i.e., audits with multiple deficiencies, a single deficiency, or with an incorrect opinion on the financial statements and/or ICFR).
- Audit area.
- Firm-identified risk assessment, if applicable (i.e., fraud risk, significant risk).
- Auditing standard.
- Paragraph of the auditing standard.
Part I.B of PCAOB inspection reports discusses instances of noncompliance with PCAOB standards or rules that don’t relate directly to the sufficiency or appropriateness of evidence the audit firm obtained to support its opinion(s), such as critical audit matters and Form AP. The Part I.B dataset provides the entire description of each Part I.B deficiency and the auditing standard pertaining to that blunder.
In addition to the two new datasets, the PCAOB enhanced the existing downloadable dataset that is focused on firm-level information for the more than 4,000 inspection reports that have been published by the PCAOB. First released in July 2023, this dataset now provides additional detail about the audits selected for review in a given inspection, to the extent the information was included in the public portion of a firm inspection report.
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Tags: accounting firms, Auditing, inspection reports, PCAOB
