As many of you know the PCAOB mandated that the auditors of large accelerated filers with fiscal years ending after 6/30/2019 include a description and other facts about Critical Audit Matters in the audit report.  These started becoming available in July.  We began overhauling some parts of our infrastructure to parse out these reports and make them available for direct download from our platform.  The initial work has been completed and these are now available.

Here is a screenshot of the Critical Audit Matters section of Apple’s audit report from their 10-K filed last week.  If you are not familiar with our application the audit report is displayed in our SmartBrowser – which allows our users to to review htm and txt documents with intuitive features to advance through a collection of documents.

These are interesting reading and I suspect there are some great opportunities for research with these reports.  I will note that I have already used some of the discussions from some earlier ones to help me make some points with my Intermediate Accounting classes.  There is something really salient for students when they read about the challenges of auditing revenue for a company that has multiple performance obligations and has to recognize revenue over time.

You should be able to see these reports listed in the artifact list when you create a request file – they should show up as the last item in the list of Text Sections list of artifacts.

If you have a properly organized request file, select AUDIT_REPORT from the ExtractionPreprocessed menu and hit the Okay button our server will process your request and deliver these snips to your desktop.

Of course the immediate problem is identifying those companies that are Large Accelerated Filers who have a FYE after 6/30/2019.  To make this step a little easier we will maintain a list of filers who meet that criteria and make it available to you as we update the archive.  A current list that is organized as a request file is available here.

Thus, if you save the request file you can then use it with the ExtractionPreprocessed feature to download these audit reports.  Right now we are still running the code on a batched basis.  In the near future we will automate this so these reports are available within 15 or so minutes after the source document (usually a 10-K) has been filed.

In the very near future I will make a new post that describes how you can use the built-in indexing engine of our application to build indexes of these documents so you can search them for relevant content.  Here is an image of one of my tests when I was searching for revenue recognition as a critical audit matter

Again – I will provide more information later – but this feature is now live