The CMDash Independence Covenant
The auditor and assessor directory on CMDash is not a pay-to-rank marketplace. A firm is listed if it opts in, and every listing is ordered the same way for every visitor — alphabetically, by firm name.
What is true today
- No pay-to-rank field exists. The database model behind every directory listing (
AuditorProfile) has no fee, price, sponsor, rank, priority, boost or “featured” column of any kind — there is nothing in the schema an auditor could pay to change. - Listings are always alphabetical. Both the authenticated directory browse and the public directory read (the same one this site’s partner and auditor directory is built from) sort strictly by firm name, ascending, with no other ordering signal.
- Listing is opt-in. A firm’s profile is not shown by default — it appears only once the firm explicitly turns listing on, the same opt-in default CMDash uses for benchmark participation.
- No client roster is exposed. A directory listing carries the firm’s own public profile fields only. It is never joined to which client organizations currently engage that firm, so browsing the directory cannot be used to infer an auditor’s client list.
How this is enforced
These are not just written promises. An automated test, apps/api/test/auditor-directory-neutrality.spec.ts, runs on every change to this codebase and fails the build if the directory’s data model ever grows a fee, price, sponsor, rank, priority, boost or featured-type field, or if the listing query stops sorting deterministically by firm name.
Source: apps/api/prisma/schema.prisma (the AuditorProfile model) and apps/api/src/auditor-directory/auditor-directory.service.ts (the browse and browsePublic methods this page describes).
What this page is not
This is not a signed legal commitment, and it does not describe every rule an auditor or assessor relationship is subject to — see the Terms of Service for those. It is a factual statement of what the directory’s code does and does not allow today, published so it can be checked against the source directly rather than taken on faith.