PwC’s 2021 PCAOB Inspection Report highlights sustained, profession-leading audit quality

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s (PCAOB) 2021 Inspection Report—primarily covering 2020 audits—highlights PwC’s sustained, profession-leading audit quality results.

• The 2021 Inspection Report includes two audits in Part I.A of the 56 inspected (including two reviews of interim financial information). 

• This builds on our exemplary record of quality exhibited last year when, of the 58 inspected (including six reviews of interim financial information), only one audit was included in Part I.A in the 2020 Inspection Report. 

Audit quality is—and always will be—PwC’s top priority, and the investments we have made to maintain and continually enhance audit quality have positively impacted these results, as well as our own internal inspection results. Our multidisciplinary model provides a framework that further enhances the quality of our work and the value of our client service. It allows us to leverage individuals with specialized skill sets from across the firm to support audit engagements and help solve increasingly complex problems. 

Our 2022 Audit Quality Report provides more information about how our culture and values, people, audit process, and approach to quality management support our long-standing quality objectives, including how we: 

• Continued to reimagine the end-to-end audit experience by providing additional training, further expanding our data extraction and analytics capabilities, growing our comprehensive suite of tools for teams to use in performing certain risk assessment procedures, and more. 

• Launched My+, our new people strategy that provides greater flexibility in how and where our people work and increases opportunities to recognize their contributions with meaningful rewards.

• Took meaningful steps to attract talent, hiring nearly 1,700 entry-level and 800 experienced audit professionals, and more than 1,900 audit interns to supplement our workforce. 

We will continue to build on our record of quality, client service, tools and technologies, and people experience. As we move forward with executing against The New Equation, our global strategy, PwC is investing $1 billion into the next generation of the audit to deliver a new audit ecosystem—including investing in new technologies and revisiting underlying audit methodologies to standardize, simplify and automate our audit work and, most importantly, continue to enhance audit quality. These investments, coupled with the power of our people, will allow us to fulfill our purpose to build trust in society and solve important problems. 

To view PwC’s full 2021 PCAOB inspection report, visit pcaobus.org.