PCAOB Form AP
A public PCAOB filing that names the accounting firm and the individual partner who signed off on a company's audited financial statements.
What it is
PCAOB Form AP is a disclosure filing that a registered public accounting firm must submit to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board after issuing an audit report for an SEC-reporting company. It was phased in during 2017: engagement-partner disclosure applies to audit reports issued on or after January 31, 2017, and other-firm participation disclosure to reports issued on or after June 30, 2017. (The PCAOB adopted the rule in December 2015 and the SEC approved it in May 2016, but no Form AP was filed until 2017.) Before that, audit reports were signed only in the firm's name, so the individual partner running the engagement was invisible to the public. Form AP names that engagement partner, gives them a unique Partner ID, and identifies the lead audit firm by its PCAOB Firm ID. It also discloses other accounting firms that took part in the audit: any firm contributing 5% or more of total audit hours is named individually, with its location and its percentage of hours, while firms below 5% are reported only as a count of firms and a combined percentage. The PCAOB publishes all of it in a free, searchable database called AuditorSearch.
Why it matters
Form AP puts a name on accountability. It lets anyone check which firm and which partner stood behind a set of financial statements, and whether that same partner has signed other companies whose accounting later came into question. For an IPO in particular, the auditor is one of the few external checks on numbers that have no long public track record, so knowing who did the work — and how much of it was performed by other firms rather than the lead auditor — is useful background context. It also makes auditor changes visible: a company that switches firms or partners leaves a trace. A pitfall is that Form AP is purely a disclosure record and carries no assessment of quality — it does not say an audit was rigorous or weak, it does not flag problems, and the presence of a well-known firm or a high hour share at other firms is not evidence of anything by itself. Treat it as a fact to investigate further, never as a conclusion about a company's financial statements.
How it's calculated
There is no calculation — Form AP is a disclosure form, so the "inputs" are fields the lead audit firm types in and files with the PCAOB, generally within 35 days after the audit report is first included in a document filed with the SEC (10 days for an IPO). The firm reports the issuer's name and CIK, the audit report date, the engagement partner's full name and unique Partner ID, the firm's own PCAOB-assigned Firm ID, and whether any other accounting firms participated. Where other firms took part, each one responsible for 5% or more of total audit hours is named individually, with its city and state (or city and country if outside the US) and its percentage of total audit hours; firms below 5% are disclosed only as a count and a combined percentage, not individually. The PCAOB compiles these filings into AuditorSearch, a free public database searchable by issuer, firm, or partner name. Reading it is a lookup, not an arithmetic exercise: you match the company to its filing and read off the firm, the partner, and the hour percentages.
How Quintarthai uses it
On the Quintarthai IPO screener's detail view, the PCAOB Form AP data is shown alongside the other prospectus facts — so you can see which audit firm and which engagement partner stand behind the financials a company is taking public, next to the 424B4 lock-up quote and greenshoe details. It is presented as background research on the filing, with no scoring or judgement attached. See /app/.