Companies Quietly Change Numbers They Have Already Published

Every public company in America has to file its accounts with a regulator, and anyone can read them for free.

Here is the part most people never notice. Each new filing repeats the old figures next to the new ones, so you can compare. The same number, for the same three months, gets published again and again for years.

Which means you can check whether it stays the same.

It Often Does Not

I took 6,267 companies and followed two figures through every filing each of them has ever made: what they owned, and what they earned.

397,407 times, a figure for one period got published more than once. 37,472 of those came back as a different number.

That is about one figure in ten. And 66.6% of the companies have done it at least once.

Usually It Is Tiny

26.0% of the changes move the figure by less than a tenth of one per cent. Nobody would notice, and nobody should care — unless a computer is comparing the two, in which case it is a mismatch.

12.3% move it by more than a quarter. Those you would notice.

And It Arrives Late

41.2% of the corrections turn up a year or more after the original. Only 2.2% arrive within four months.

There is a special kind of filing for correcting an earlier one. Almost nobody uses it: 8.4% of these corrections came that way. The rest just appear in the next ordinary report, sitting in the comparison column, with nothing to say they changed.

So if you wrote the number down last year, nothing will ever tell you it has moved. You would have to go back and look.

Four Times The Data Fooled Me

Before any of the above was true, I had to throw out four kinds of nonsense. Each one, left in, produced a much better headline than the real one.

A different document meaning a different thing. Companies tag their executive-pay documents with the same labels as their accounts. One company's annual report said it lost $19.2 million; its pay document, using the same label, said $35.0 billion. Read carelessly that is a restatement of 182,471%. It is not a restatement of anything. Excluding those documents dropped 23,712 figures.

Three extra zeros. 315 of the changes are the same digits at the wrong size. One company filed $22,632,000 for a quarter three times, and then $22,632,000,000.

Zero. 145 of them change to or from exactly nothing. One bank filed $1.8 trillion of assets for 2008 three times, and then 0. It did not lose everything; somebody tagged a blank.

A number the company could never have had. 611 changes involve a figure more than 20 times bigger than anything that company normally reports. One bank that earns around a hundred million a quarter filed six and a half billion.

And after all four, I still cannot vouch for the extreme end. 74 changes are tenfold or more, and short of reading the filings there is no way to tell a genuine collapse from a typo. So I stopped claiming. The page shows a middle band — changes between 5% and 100% — where the change is big enough to matter and too small to be a slipped decimal, and shows the extreme tail separately, labelled as mostly mistakes.

What The Real Ones Look Like

5,437 changes sit in that middle band, and they are boring in the best way. A company splits in two, and has to restate what the remaining half ever owned. An accounting rule changes and every prior year is redone to match. A company buys another and folds its past into its own.

The biggest by percentage is SLM Corp, whose figure for 2013-12-31 moved -93.3%.

Nobody did anything wrong. That is exactly why this is worth knowing: the numbers move as a matter of routine, not scandal.

Even The Word Changed

The labels move too. The tag companies used for "revenue" was replaced when the accounting rule for revenue changed. The old one has gone from 2,309 companies down to 0. The replacement went from nothing to 2,967.

Anyone who wrote a program to fetch "revenue" using the old label got a shrinking answer every year and no error message.

Two Things I Cannot Tell You

Why any of it changed. The regulator's website is public property, but the words inside each filing belong to the company that wrote them. I only took the numbers, dates and labels, never the explanations. So I can tell you a figure moved, by how much and how late, and never why.

Whether anything else moved. I followed two figures. A company can rewrite its revenue, its stock or a whole division without either of mine changing at all.