Information from the first Form AP filings, which among other things discloses the name of the engagement partner who worked on an audit, is now available in a searchable PCAOB database, according to Compliance Week. 

The Form AP filings have revealed, according to Compliance Week, that an auditor named William Corey, with PwC, is the partner in charge of the firm’s engagement for Laureate Education Inc., while EY has reported that James McCaulley is the engagement partner for its external audit of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. Grant Thornton, meanwhile, provided the names of engagement partners for 15 separate audits of a series of investment companies, according to Compliance Week.

These filings will be the first of many as more firms move to comply with the new rule that requires them. Formally approvedby the board in May, the regulation requires that firms disclose:

* The name of the engagement partner, and their Partner ID (a unique ten-digit identifier that will now need to be assigned by the firm to each partner who serves as engagement partner for issuer audits) and any Partner ID previously associated with the engagement partner;

* any other accounting firm, or person or entity that opines on the compliance of any entity's financial statements, that took part in the audit;

* the total number of hours other firms participated in the audit; and

* if another accounting firm individually contributed 5 percent or more of total audit hours, Form AP would also require the other firms' legal name, city and state of headquarters office, firm ID where applicable, and percent of total audit hours.
 
Publicly identifying the lead audit engagement partner has been a longtime priority for the PCAOB, having tried and failed to implement such a measure twice before. The first time was in 2011, when it proposed requiring that the engagement partner name, as well as information about other audit participants, be listed in the audit report itself, but it failed to gain traction. Then, in 2013, the board issued a revised proposal that relaxed some of the disclosed requirements but maintained the core principle that the lead audit engagement partner and other audit participants be identified in the audit report.

The final rule, which is now being implemented, took a new tack by requiring the disclosure not on the audit report itself but through a separate form, the Form AP, that would be filed directly with the PCAOB. 

PCAOB member Steven B. Harris, in a June statement supporting the measure, said that the new regulation would help improve audit quality through increased accountability for the engagement partner. 

"I believe that one way to improve audit quality is to make the audit engagement partner, the person most directly responsible for the audit, feel more individually accountable for the audit by having that person sign the audit report itself.

Another PCAOB member, Lewis H. Ferguson, noted in a June statement that as more and more firms file their Form AP, over time they will build a body of data about individual engagement partners that he believed could be useful in assessing the reliability of the audit report and in voting whether to approve the selection of auditors. 

"It seems likely that eventually information will be publicly available about engagement partners such as the companies they have audited, their industry experience, any disciplinary actions in which they have been involved and likely other information," he said. 

The PCAOB, when first proposing the Form AP, noted that firms expressed concern that such a body of data could give rise to a rating or star system for individual auditors, which they worried would create unfair advantages in the market by making certain individuals be in high demand versus other, equally qualified practitioners. However the board felt that such a system would not be so bad.