PCAOB Auditor Inspection Report Scraper - Audit Firm Deficiency Data

Extract audit firm inspection data from the US Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) — covering firm name, country, global network affiliation (Big Four and independents), inspection year, Part I.A deficiency counts, deficiency rates, and direct links to inspection report PDFs. Coverage spans 4,292 records across 59 countries from 2003 to 2025.

The data comes directly from PCAOB's pre-built public JSON feed at pcaobus.org. This is not HTML scraping — the actor fetches a structured JSON endpoint that PCAOB maintains and updates as new inspection reports are published. No authentication, no proxy, and no rate limiting is required.

What does the PCAOB scraper do?

It fetches the complete PCAOB inspection JSON feed, applies your filters (firm name, country, global network, year range), and returns matching records as structured dataset rows. A full unfiltered run returns all 4,292 records. Filtered runs can narrow to a specific country like the United Kingdom or Japan, a specific network like Deloitte or KPMG, or a specific year range.

What data does it extract?

Each record represents one audit firm for one inspection year:

Field	Description
registration_id	PCAOB firm registration ID
firm_name	Audit firm name
country	Country where the firm is registered
global_network	Global network affiliation (e.g. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited)
inspection_year	Year of inspection
inspection_report_date	Date the inspection report was released
inspection_type	Annually Inspected or Triennially Inspected
total_audits_reviewed	Total number of audits reviewed in the inspection
audits_with_part_ia_deficiencies	Number of audits with Part I.A deficiencies identified
part_ia_deficiency_rate	Deficiency rate as percentage of audits reviewed
total_issuer_audit_clients	Total number of issuer audit clients
integrated_audits	Number of integrated audits (financial statements and ICFR)
financial_statement_audits_only	Number of financial-statement-only audits
includes_public_qc_criticisms	Whether report includes public quality control criticisms (Yes/No)
report_pdf_url	Direct URL to the inspection report PDF

Sample output record

{
  "registration_id": 1433,
  "firm_name": "Ernst & Young AB",
  "country": "Sweden",
  "global_network": "Ernst & Young Global Limited",
  "inspection_year": 2025,
  "inspection_report_date": "26-Mar-2026",
  "inspection_type": "Triennially Inspected",
  "total_audits_reviewed": 3,
  "audits_with_part_ia_deficiencies": 0,
  "part_ia_deficiency_rate": 0,
  "total_issuer_audit_clients": 4,
  "integrated_audits": 3,
  "financial_statement_audits_only": 0,
  "includes_public_qc_criticisms": "No",
  "report_pdf_url": "https://assets.pcaobus.org/..."
}

How to use it

Parameter	Type	Description
firmName	string	Filter by firm name (case-insensitive contains). Leave blank for all firms.
country	string	Filter by country name (e.g. United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Canada, Australia, France, Netherlands, Singapore, India). Leave blank for all 59 countries.
globalNetwork	string	Filter by global network (e.g. Deloitte, KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young). Leave blank for all.
inspectionYearFrom	integer	Earliest inspection year to include.
inspectionYearTo	integer	Latest inspection year to include.
maxItems	integer	Maximum records to return. Set to 0 for all records.

Example: pull only recent inspections for compliance review

{
  "inspectionYearFrom": 2023,
  "inspectionYearTo": 2025,
  "maxItems": 0
}

Example: track a specific network across all years

{
  "globalNetwork": "KPMG",
  "maxItems": 0
}

For scheduled legislative monitoring, pair inspectionYearFrom with an Apify scheduled run to pull only records from the current year as new reports are published quarterly.

Use cases

• SEC compliance — identify firms with elevated deficiency rates before engaging them for an audit engagement
• Audit-quality research — track Part I.A deficiency trends across firms, inspection years, and global networks
• Securities litigation — source inspection findings to support plaintiff-side cases involving audit failures
• Big Four competitive intelligence — benchmark network-level inspection outcomes across countries
• Academic accounting research — build a longitudinal dataset of auditor quality metrics from 2003 to present

FAQ

Is this data public? Yes. The PCAOB publishes inspection reports and their underlying data as public records. The JSON feed the actor reads is open and requires no authentication.

How often is the data updated? PCAOB releases new inspection reports throughout the year. Re-run the actor with inspectionYearFrom set to the current year to pull the latest reports.

What does report_pdf_url link to? Direct links to PDF files hosted on assets.pcaobus.org. These are publicly accessible without login.

Output is available in JSON, CSV, and Excel via the Apify dataset export panel.