Tuesday, February 9, 2021

In 2019 we first wrote about how to access Critical Audit Matters (CAMs) from corporate financial statements using Calcbench.

Today, we will re-examine the information from the latest set of filings that have come in. Please note that we are still early in filing season, so don't draw too many conclusions from this just yet!

Some summary-level data first:

  1. We examined 86 S&P 500 firms 10-Ks.
  2. Identified a total of 124 CAMS in our sample (for example, Amazon reports one CAM while Becton Dickinson reports three, so that's a total of four CAMs).
  3. Eight-five firms reported at least one CAM.
  4. Seven firms reported three CAMs.

We compiled a summary of the most commonly reported CAMs in the table below.

Please note that this is our initial attempt to organize CAMs by topic. There is much more detail behind this summary. In addition, here is a link to the file that contains each firm we reviewed, its primary auditor, and the list of CAMs reported in its 10-K.

Lastly, in the list, we found 2 cases that had personal interest. These were from Disney (ticker:DIS CashTag:$DIS) and Netflix (ticker:NFLX CashTag:$NFLX). Both had to do with the Amortization of Content related costs. In Disney's case, this was a new CAM, whereas Netflix had also presented this CAM in last years 10-K.

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