Audit Analytics: auditor, disclosure, and restatement data (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

Audit Analytics is a paid licensed product (Audit Analytics, an Ideagen company), so it carries no provenance badge: the access path below was not run in this session (no WRDS or Audit Analytics credentials were available). The page documents the access route and the gotchas; treat it as unverified until someone exercises it through a licensed account. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

Audit Analytics (an Ideagen company) is the standard database of audit- and disclosure-related corporate events drawn from SEC filings: auditor identity and fees (audit and non-audit fees), auditor changes and dismissals, internal-control (SOX 404) opinions and material weaknesses, financial-statement restatements, late filings (NT 10-K/Q), litigation, and other disclosure events. It is the go-to source for restatement and auditor-quality research. Papers we distill use it, for example Griffin et al. on the decline in loan-covenant violations, which draws on restatement and disclosure data.

• Cost: licensed, subscription. No free tier.
• Vendor: Audit Analytics (an Ideagen company).
• Coverage: SEC registrants; auditor and fee data from around 2000, restatements and SOX 404 data from the early-2000s onward; sourced from EDGAR filings.

Access (when licensed)

• Via WRDS. Audit Analytics is most commonly reached through WRDS, under the Audit Analytics libraries (audit fees, auditor changes, restatements, SOX 404 internal controls, non-reliance restatements, comment letters). Records are keyed by Audit Analytics company identifiers that link to the EDGAR CIK and, via a link table, to gvkey / Compustat.
• Via direct subscription. Audit Analytics also sells a direct subscription outside WRDS; check whether your institution licenses it that way.
• The underlying source is SEC EDGAR; Audit Analytics parses and codes the filings into structured tables.
• Credentials are required. Keep any credentials in .env, never hard-coded.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• Restatement dating has several dates, and the wrong one misaligns event studies. A restatement carries the restated period, the filing / announcement date, and the 8-K Item 4.02 non-reliance date; picking the wrong date shifts the event window. The “non-reliance” restatement file is the stricter subset and differs from the broader restatement file; decide which population the question needs.
• The data is event/filing-keyed, not firm-year-keyed. A firm can have multiple events, so collapsing to a panel requires explicit aggregation rules (count, first, most severe) rather than a one-to-one join.
• Identifier linking needs the WRDS link table. Audit Analytics keys on its own company id and CIK; linking to Compustat gvkey or CRSP runs through the WRDS link table, which leaves unmatched cases. Do not assume a clean merge.
• Fee data depends on what is disclosed. Audit versus non-audit fee classifications and the universe (only registrants disclosing in proxies and filings) bias coverage; small and foreign filers differ in what they report.
• Coverage start dates differ by module. SOX 404 data is only post-2004, for example, so a pooled sample inherits the most-restrictive start date across the modules it touches.
• Definitions and taxonomies evolve. Material-weakness types and restatement categories change over time, so the flags are not constant across the full history; pin the extraction date and do not assume a category means the same thing across years.
• Parsed from filings, so classification errors exist. Because the data is coded from filings, there are known classification errors; cross-check material cases against the underlying EDGAR filing when a case drives the result.

Reference: the main modules

Module	What it holds
Audit Fees	Audit and non-audit fees, auditor identity, engagement fields
Auditor Changes	Auditor dismissals and resignations, opinion changes
Restatements	Financial-statement restatements with restated periods and dates
Non-Reliance Restatements	Stricter subset tied to 8-K Item 4.02 non-reliance disclosures
SOX 404 Internal Controls	Internal-control opinions and material-weakness types
Comment Letters	SEC staff comment letters and responses

Each module is event/filing-keyed and starts in a different year; field availability differs between them.

Citation

Cite the provider and the access route, e.g.: Audit Analytics (via WRDS), accessed YYYY-MM-DD. State the modules used (audit fees, restatements, non-reliance restatements, SOX 404 internal controls), and the extraction date.