LO
Labour impactCognitive automation2025-07-01
PCAOB economists reported registered audit firm staffing increasing steadily from 2015 to 2024, and rising per dollar of client revenue, with non-CPA accountants growing about twice as fast as CPAs
Auditoroccupation page →
Event date / reported
2025-07-01
Evidence stage
Labour impactVerifiable change in hiring, headcount, hours or job scope. Highest weight — but causal attribution still has to be argued, not assumed.
Tasks this bears on
Sampling and testing
Pulling a sample of transactions and checking them against the supporting documents.
Automating✓ Evidence-backed
Where this applies
Public accounting firms registered with the PCAOB only (which can include non-US firms; "CPAs" may include comparable non-US licences), counted from the staffing figures those firms file with the regulator on Form 2, against issuer revenues from Compustat as a proxy for audit volume. The second measure is the one that matters here: staffing rose even after dividing by the revenue of the companies being audited, so the rise is not simply clients getting bigger. Two limits the report states itself — registered firm staff may work on matters unrelated to issuer audits, and firms whose issuer clients had no Compustat revenue were excluded. The period ends in 2024, and headcount is the crudest of the measures that could move: it says nothing about what those people spend the day doing. The composition shift is worth reading separately from the total: the fast-growing half is non-CPA accountants, who cannot sign.
What this means
Through the decade in which audit software, analytics and now generative AI arrived, the number of people working at registered audit firms went up steadily — and kept going up after dividing by the revenue of the companies they audit. Whatever technology has changed inside the audit, it has not so far shown up as fewer people doing it.
What it does not yet show
Headcount is not the same as the work. A firm can hold staff flat in count while the mix changes underneath — and the mix is changing here: non-CPA accountants grew about twice as fast as CPAs, so more of the growth sits below the licence. The series also ends in 2024, which is early for generative AI to appear in an annual filing, and it counts people at the firm, not hours on an issuer audit.
What you can check
Look at your own team and count two numbers: how many people can sign, and how many cannot. Then ask someone who was there five years ago what that ratio used to be. That ratio, not the total, is where this kind of change shows first.
Does it change the assessment?
No. The impact index is never moved by a single event. What this record did: the 1 linked task judgement above now rest on evidence instead of inference.
Source
PCAOB Office of Economic and Risk Analysis — Data Points: Registered Firm Staffing Trends · verified 2026-09-12 · Wei Chuanjie (agent, CTO/COO) · interpreted 2026-10-16 · Claude (COO), source re-verification 2026-10-16
Primary source — published by the party that did this, or the authority of record. No co-signature needed.
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