Wednesday, January 27, 2016

As we await the arrival of 10-K’s from firms whose fiscal years ended in December, we thought that we would see if our data could tell us when we might be able to see some information.

After all, who can’t wait to dig into those juicy footnotes?

So, we took a look using the data that we had from last year. Using all firms that had a Fiscal Year End of December 31st and those that reported Revenue of at least $1 Billion (1141 filings), we found that the average wait time was 56 calendar days.

For the biggest 100 revenue producing firms the wait time was averaging 54 days.

Which top firms were the fastest? Here is the list (slowest on the next table at the bottom)

* Caveat * This is only for firms that have a fiscal year end of December 31, examples like Apple, Oracle and Microsoft are NOT included in the list

Days From FiscalYear End to Filing
United Rentals Inc /DE 21
Mdc Holdings Inc 28
Amazon Com Inc 29
Schlumberger Ltd /NV/ 29
Facebook Inc 29
Broadcom Corp 29
Netflix Inc 29
Kansas City Southern 30
Northrop Grumman Corp /DE/ 33
Sensata Technologies Holding N.V. 34
General Motors Co 35
Biogen Inc. 35
Pultegroup Inc/MI/ 35
Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc 35
United Technologies Corp /DE/ 36
Dupont E I De Nemours & Co 36
Arrow Electronics Inc 36
Ebay Inc 36

Slowest?

Days From FiscalYear End to Filing
Trinet Group Inc 89
Universal American Corp. 89
Phoenix Companies Inc/DE 89
VEREIT, Inc. 89
InvenTrust Properties Corp. 86
Smithfield Foods Inc 84
Smart & Final Stores, Inc. 84
Veritiv Corp 83
Tribune Publishing Co 83
Affinion Group Holdings, Inc. 78
Chiquita Brands International Inc 77
Triple-S Management Corp 77
Zebra Technologies Corp 76
First Niagara Financial Group Inc 76
CAESARS ENTERTAINMENT Corp 75
Sprague Resources LP 75
Ryerson Holding Corp 75
Primoris Services Corp 75

There are academic papers that spend more time on this topic (aka “the Audit Delay”) than we do. See here for an example

** In an original posting, 3 firms were misidentified with Fiscal Year Ends in December. The issue was corrected and the firms were removed from the list. Calcbench apologizes for the mistake.

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