SEC AAER: What Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases Are

An SEC AAER, short for Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Release, is the label the SEC gives to an enforcement action involving accountants, auditors or financial reporting, not a separate legal proceeding of its own. If you have seen a release with both a civil action number and an "AAER-####" tag on it, that is why: the same action is filed once and indexed twice.

This guide covers what an AAER actually documents, how its numbering works, how far back the data goes, where the dataset has become a research standard, and how to pull the feed as structured JSON.

What an AAER actually documents

The SEC's Division of Enforcement brings two main kinds of actions: civil lawsuits filed in federal court, published as litigation releases, and the SEC's own internal orders, published as administrative proceedings. An AAER is not a third kind of action. It is a label the SEC applies after the fact to whichever of those two it already brought, whenever the underlying conduct involves accounting, auditing or financial reporting.

That is why a single AAER release commonly lists more than one reference number. A real example from SecFeed's feed, concerning a company called Latch, Inc., carries a Release No. field reading "33-11450, 34-106568, AAER-4604": a Securities Act release number, an Exchange Act release number, and the AAER number, all describing one action.

How far back AAER data goes

The SEC's own online archive of AAERs begins in October 1999, with release AAER-1190 as the earliest release carrying that numbering in the public archive. That is a quirk of when the SEC started publishing the archive online, not when AAERs began: researchers building academic datasets from the underlying releases have compiled AAER records going back to 1982, well before the SEC's own web archive starts. If a tool or dataset claims full AAER coverage, check which of those two starting points it actually uses.

Reading the release number

Not every release carries all three. A purely administrative matter against an individual accountant, for example, may show only a 34-series number alongside the AAER number, with no 33-series number at all, since no securities offering was involved.

Why AAERs became a research dataset

Academic accounting research has used AAERs as its standard source for studying financial statement fraud since at least the mid-1990s. The most cited example is Dechow, Ge, Larson and Sloan's 2011 paper in Contemporary Accounting Research, which built a database from 2,190 AAERs issued between 1982 and 2005 to predict material misstatements; a later, extended version of that dataset covers 4,278 AAERs issued between 1982 and 2021. Because AAERs name the company, the individuals involved and the alleged conduct in one place, they let researchers link enforcement outcomes back to financial statement characteristics without reading thousands of litigation releases to find the accounting-related ones by hand.

Working with AAER data as a developer

SecFeed reads the SEC's AAER release list and refreshes it every 30 minutes, so you can pull the feed without scraping the page yourself:

curl "https://secfeedapi.com/v1/enforcement/aaer" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

Each release includes the title, the combined release number, and every linked document:

{
  "publishedAt": "2026-10-01T20:59:30Z",
  "title": "Latch, Inc.",
  "url": "https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2026/33-11450.pdf",
  "releaseNo": "33-11450, 34-106568, AAER-4604",
  "fields": {
    "Release No.": "33-11450, 34-106568, AAER-4604",
    "See Also": "Administrative Summary"
  },
  "documents": [
    {"title": "Latch, Inc.", "url": "https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2026/33-11450.pdf"}
  ]
}

Results come 100 per page, and an empty releases array means you have reached the end of the archive:

from secfeed import Client

sf = Client("YOUR_API_KEY")
page = 0
while True:
    data = sf.enforcement(kind="aaer", page=page)
    if not data["releases"]:
        break
    for r in data["releases"]:
        print(r["releaseNo"], r["title"])
    page += 1

Pass details=true to also fetch the release text, which only works for releases published as HTML pages; most AAERs are PDFs and return no text that way. For the related release types an AAER usually points back to, see SEC press releases and the SEC's other release types and the administrative proceedings guide. The full field list is documented on the AAER API page.

Frequently asked questions

What does AAER stand for?

Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Release. It is the SEC's label for an enforcement action tied to accounting, auditing or financial reporting misconduct.

Is an AAER a type of SEC filing?

No. An AAER is not filed on EDGAR as its own document type. It is the SEC's index label attached to a litigation release or administrative proceeding it already brought, so the same case has an AAER number in addition to its litigation or administrative release number.

How far back do AAERs go?

The SEC's own online archive begins in October 1999. Academic researchers have compiled AAER data from the underlying releases going back to 1982, before the SEC's web archive existed.

Why do researchers use AAERs to study accounting fraud?

Because each release names the company, the individuals charged and the alleged conduct in one document, AAERs let researchers identify confirmed cases of financial statement misconduct without manually screening every SEC litigation release for accounting-related content. The Dechow, Ge, Larson and Sloan dataset built from AAERs is widely cited in that research.

Can I get notified when a new AAER is published?

There is no dedicated AAER alert from the SEC. Polling the AAER feed's first page periodically and comparing release numbers against what you already have, as shown above, is the practical way to detect new releases.