The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board isn’t yet making much headway in catching up on overdue international inspections, but the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill at least clears an obstacle the board has repeatedly blamed for its inability to meet its inspection mandate.

The PCAOB published an updated status report on its international inspection program saying it made no progress from Jan. 1 to June 30 of this year in checking in on firms whose inspections the board deferred in 2009. The board lists more than 70 firms, many of them affiliates of the Big 4 and other major international firms, that have not yet been inspected, even though they have been doing audit work for companies listed on U.S. exchanges for four years or more.

The list is shorter than the last time the PCAOB published it by three firms, but only because those firms withdrew from PCAOB registration. Most of the uninspected firms are located in China or countries of the European Union, where firms and government leaders have resisted the PCAOB inspection process by citing conflicts with their laws at home.

The PCAOB has said many countries are resistant because the PCAOB has been barred under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act from sharing information arising from inspections with regulators in those countries. The board lobbied Congress to give the board the authority to share inspection findings, which Congress granted in July as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The PCAOB has said the newfound authority will facilitate the sharing of information with foreign auditor oversight authorities, and it hopes that will open the logjam in those countries that have been refusing inspections.

The U.S. auditing regulator says it continues to work to eliminate obstacles to international inspections, but in the meantime it is publishing the list of uninspected audit firms to put investors on notice. “As long as those obstacles persist, investors in U.S. markets who rely on those firms’ audit reports are deprived of the potential benefit of PCAOB inspections of those auditors,” the board wrote in its update.