With restatements booming as never before, a new study suggests we are seeing the emergence of "serial restaters".
According to the Glass Lewis & Co study, of nearly 2000 public US companies who restated their financial reports from 2003, about 300 were repeat offenders. That's 15 per cent. Furthermore, 72 companies restated their results in 2005 and during the three year period, 42 issued restatements three times and six revised their filings on four occasions. The study also found that half the restatements were made by companies that disclosed material weakness with their internal controls which are supposed to ensure the numbers stack up. The much-hated Section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley , which the SEC is considering rolling back for smaller companies, specifically deals with internal controls for financial reporting. According to Glass Lewis, smaller companies are more likely to restate, suggesting their internal controls are not that flash.
The obvious conclusion: these accounting revisions could often point to systemic problems inside the systems of the business that produce those statements. In other words, there are systemic issues that make it hard for them to add up.
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