PCAOB Form AP Auditor Lookup — Engagement Partner & Tenure

Look up who audits an SEC issuer, which named engagement partner signed it, and how many consecutive years that partner has been signing — straight from PCAOB Form AP.

Give it a CIK. Get back the full audit engagement history by fiscal year, the audit firm and named engagement partner for each, computed partner tenure against the five-year lead-partner rotation limit, and every auditor and partner change with the year it happened.

Form AP is the only public record naming the individual engagement partner on a US issuer audit. This Actor turns it into something you can query in bulk.

What you get

For each issuer:

Field	What it is
currentAuditFirms / currentEngagementPartners	Who signed the most recent fiscal period
rotationAssessment	Per current partner: consecutive years signed, and where that stands against the five-year limit
engagementPartnerTenure	Every partner who has signed, with fiscal years served and longest consecutive run
auditFirmTenure	The same, per audit firm
auditFirmChanges	Auditor changes, with the fiscal year
engagementPartnerChanges	Partner changes, with the fiscal year
engagements	One entry per fiscal period: firm, firm office, partner, secondary partner, report type, fund series, report and filing dates

Who this is for

• Investors and analysts — auditor changes and unusually long partner tenure are classic governance screens. Run a whole portfolio in one go.
• Audit committees and audit firms — track lead-partner rotation across an issuer book instead of by hand.
• Litigation support and forensic accountants — establish who signed which audit, in which year, from the authoritative filing.
• Academic researchers — bulk auditor-and-partner panel data without buying a commercial dataset.

Input

{
  "issuers": [
    { "recordId": "P-1", "cik": "320193" },
    { "recordId": "P-2", "cik": "1318605" },
    { "recordId": "P-3", "issuerName": "3M CO" }
  ],
  "includeEngagements": true
}

Bare CIK strings work too: {"issuers": ["320193", "1318605"]}.

• cik — the SEC CIK. Leading zeros are fine (0000320193 = 320193). This is the reliable way to look an issuer up.
• issuerName — matched exactly after normalising case, punctuation and corporate suffixes (Apple Inc. = APPLE INC = Apple). A near miss returns issuer_not_found plus suggestions — it will never quietly answer about a different company, because Apple Inc. and Apple Hospitality REIT, Inc. are not the same issuer.
• recordId — optional, echoed back on every result so output joins to your own records.
• Ticker symbols are not supported. The ticker column in the PCAOB export is empty for every row, by design. Use CIK.

Up to 5,000 issuers per run. Set includeEngagements to false for a compact result with just the computed summary.

Sample output

{
  "recordId": "P-1",
  "status": "found",
  "issuerName": "Apple Inc.",
  "issuerCik": "320193",
  "latestFiscalPeriodEnd": "2025-09-27",
  "currentAuditFirms": ["Ernst & Young LLP"],
  "currentEngagementPartners": ["Craig Ralph Smith Jr."],
  "partnerRotationFlagged": false,
  "rotationAssessment": [
    {
      "partnerName": "Craig Ralph Smith Jr.",
      "consecutiveFiscalYears": 2,
      "firstFiscalYear": 2024,
      "rotationStatus": "within_limit",
      "tenureIsLowerBound": false
    }
  ],
  "engagementPartnerChanges": [
    { "fiscalYear": 2019, "from": ["Patrick Allen Hyek"], "to": ["Kevin Frank Asher"] },
    { "fiscalYear": 2024, "from": ["Kevin Frank Asher"], "to": ["Craig Ralph Smith Jr."] }
  ],
  "sourceAsOf": "2026-07-28"
}

Partner rotation — read this before acting on it

SEC Regulation S-X Rule 2-01(c)(6) requires the lead engagement partner to rotate off after five consecutive years. Form AP names that partner, so tenure is computable — but the public record has limits, and this Actor states them instead of papering over them.

rotationStatus is one of:

• within_limit — under five consecutive years, and the partner first appears after Form AP coverage begins for this issuer, so the count is complete.
• approaching_limit — four consecutive years, complete count.
• at_or_beyond_limit — five or more consecutive years. This is a prompt to look, not a finding of non-compliance. Rule 2-01(c)(6)(ii) exempts firms with fewer than five issuer audit clients and fewer than ten partners, and firm size is not in Form AP, so it cannot be ruled out here.
• indeterminate — the partner was already signing in the issuer's first covered year. Years served before Form AP existed are not public, so actual tenure may already exceed the limit. Reported as unresolved, never as compliant.
• not_assessed — the engagement is an employee benefit plan or investment company audit. The five-year lead-partner limit is an issuer-audit rule, so tenure is given without a verdict rather than judged by a rule that may not govern it.

All tenure figures are a floor, not a total. Form AP covers audit reports issued from 2017 onward; formApCoverageFromFiscalYear and firstFiscalYearCovered are on every record so you can see exactly how far back the evidence goes.

Data source and correctness

Source: the PCAOB Form AP firm-filings bulk export, https://assets.pcaobus.org/firm-filings/FirmFilings.zip — 155,241 filings, regenerated daily by the PCAOB. Public, keyless, no scraping.

A lookup tool that quietly returns "nothing found" when its source breaks is worse than one that crashes, so this Actor fails the run rather than reporting a clean answer it cannot stand behind. It aborts if the export is truncated, if a required column is renamed or reordered, if the amendment flag disappears, or if the newest filing is more than 30 days old (the PCAOB refreshes daily; the largest gap ever observed in the file is three days).

Three details are handled that a naive read of this file gets wrong:

1. Superseded amendments. An amended Form AP leaves the original in the export flagged Latest Form AP Filing = 0. Counting those would duplicate fiscal years and inflate partner tenure. Only current filings are read.
2. Legitimate duplicate filings. Even among current filings, one issuer and fiscal period can carry two entries — a separate filing for a dual-dated or multiple-period report, which is not marked as an amendment. Those are deduplicated; a genuinely different firm or partner in the same year survives as the distinct engagement it is.
3. Back-filed outliers. A handful of rows carry mistyped fiscal periods reaching back to 1919. Coverage is reported from the earliest year holding a material share of filings, not from the raw minimum.

Every record carries sourceAsOf and sourceRowCount so you can see exactly which snapshot answered you.

Verify any individual filing at PCAOB AuditorSearch.

Result statuses

status	Meaning
found	Form AP filings located for this issuer
issuer_not_found	No filings. Not evidence the company is unaudited — Form AP starts in 2017 and covers only PCAOB-registered firms' issuer audits. Includes name suggestions.
invalid_input	Neither a numeric CIK nor a usable issuer name was supplied

Pricing

Pay per event: one lookup run charge covering the download and the scan of all 155,241 filings, plus a small per-issuer checked charge. Malformed inputs are not charged. Platform usage costs are included.