Detection models for unintentional financial restatements

Abstract

The aim of manuscript is to analyze and identify determinants of honest accounting errors leading to financial restatements based on data from SEC database and from annual reports. Reason for this study is that accounting errors are expensive for companies that need to change already published financial statements and have impact on company reputation and stock price. Most of authors focus on prediction of accounting frauds and financial restatements remain in the background of research. This study initially tests existing accounting fraud detection model of Beneish on a sample of 40 financial restatement companies over 10 years and develops two new pioneer prediction models, one based on linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and another based on logistic regression. In testing dataset, LDA model has achieved accuracy 70.96%, specificity 25.00% and sensitivity 79.83% and logistic regression model has achieved accuracy 62.22%, specificity 41.66% and sensitivity 66.67%, performance of both models is better than existing Beneish model or other studies in this field. Developed models can be widely used by both internal and external users of financial statements, who would like to determine if financial statements of analyzed company include accounting errors or not, thanks to easily interpretable results in equation form. First published online 28 November 2019

Keywords

• unintentional financial restatement
• financial restatements
• accounting fraud
• accounting error
• linear discriminant analysis
• logistic regression