Missing Form APs?

In May of 2024, I?posted on LinkedIn?a brief note about working with data from Form APs filed with the PCAOB. In a comment on my LinkedIn posting,?Olga Usvyatsky?suggested that “the variation is not limited to firms’ names - for instance, I find errors in reporting CIK codes of the clients intriguing.” I thought it would be interesting to investigate the issue raised by Olga, but doing so would be greatly facilitated by an alternative source for data on auditor-client relationships.

Recently, I discovered that it is relatively straightforward to process XBRL data filed using SEC EDGAR using data sets prepared by the SEC and posted on its website. There are two data sets: the?Financial Statements?and?Financial Statement and Notes?data sets, with the latter being roughly ten times as large as the former. For the task we consider here, we need to use the?Financial Statement and Notes?data set.

In essence, I compare the auditors listed in firms’ 10-K filings with data on Form APs, with a focus on my success rate in matching the two. In Table 5 of the note, we can see that the auditor with the greatest number of non-matches is B F Borgers CPA PC, an auditor featured in a Financial Times?article by George Steer?that showed that the auditor Ben Borgers had used 14 different names—including the name “Ben F orgers”—on Form AP filings.?While more research would be needed to investigate the reasons for “missing” data, having Borgers emerge as the “winner” yet again suggests that missing Form AP filings might be another red flag worth pursuing.

This note was written using?Quarto?and compiled with?RStudio, an integrated development environment (IDE) for working with R. The source code for this note is available?here?and the latest version of the note is?here.