The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board charged late Tuesday that outside audits of broker-dealers are unacceptably faulty.

The regulator said deficiencies in the audits and failures to satisfy independence requirements were intolerably high and called the lack of professional care particularly concerning.

The number of broker-dealer audits with mistakes rose to 87 percent in 2014 from 79 percent the year before, said the PCAOB in its annual review of broker-dealer auditors and audits.

The agency said mistakes were made by all of the 66 public accounting firms reviewed that did broker-dealer audits and in 87 percent of the 106 audits examined.

The most frequent deficiencies uncovered were in revenue recognition; reliance on records and reports; fair-value accounting estimates; financial statement presentation and disclosures; and customer protection.

In 26 cases, roughly a quarter of the broker-dealer audits reviewed, the agency said the auditing firms also were hired to do additional work for the companies, including the preparation of financial statements in violation of longstanding SEC independence rules.

The agency has settled disciplinary orders against 14 auditing firms for independence rule infractions.

Faulting fraud detection by the outside auditors, the PCAOB inspectors found deficiencies on nine audits for the identification and assessment of the risks of material misstatement and weak responses to the fraud risk in revenue recognition.

In 16 audits, the auditors criticized the firms for not adequately testing procedures used by the broker-dealers to test the valuation of securities.

Audits of the largest broker-dealers significantly had the lowest percentage of errors.

To improve quality control, the PCAOB said auditing firms could perform additional audit procedures, inform clients of the need to make changes in financial statements and take steps to prevent reliance on previous audits.

During 2015, the regulator plans to inspect 75 firms doing outside audits for broker-dealers and 115 audits.