GET /v1/companies/audit-fees extracts disclosed principal-accountant fee rows for one issuer. It first looks for the latest DEF 14A and falls back to the latest 10-K; it is not a peer screener, a fee-history endpoint, or an auditor-independence score.
Retrieve the current disclosed table
ticker or cik; prefer the stable CIK when ticker history matters. The response is an unpaginated object: "list" with data rows containing category, nullable amount, and rawText, plus accessionNumber, filingDate, sourceForm, and request metadata. Categories are parser labels for the fee-table rows, so preserve the returned rawText when storing a number.
The usual evidence is the proxy’s principal-accountant fee table. A 10-K fallback can be relevant when the fee disclosure appears in Item 14, but sourceForm tells a reviewer which filing supplied the result.
Build a reviewable workflow
- Call the route with the issuer’s stable CIK when ticker history matters.
- Store
accessionNumber,filingDate,sourceForm,requestId, and each returned row. - Open the source filing before comparing years or interpreting non-audit fees. Confirm the fiscal periods, fee labels, auditor name, and footnotes.
- For an earlier period, first find the specific
DEF 14Aor10-Kwith filing search; this route itself always selects the latest eligible filing.
Empty results and limits
An HTTP 200 with emptydata can carry a note explaining that no eligible filing was found or that a fee table was not extracted. It does not establish zero fees, no auditor, or no disclosure. Amounts may be null when a matching row does not yield a parseable dollar amount.
Do not call the extracted categories an independence determination. The SEC filing is the source for category definitions, the relevant fiscal years, audit-committee context, and any qualification needed for an investment or compliance conclusion.