Today’s report builds on the non-GAAP analysis we released earlier this week, documenting how 260 randomly selected firms in the S&P 500 reported non-GAAP net income for 2023. Our primary findings from that report were that non-GAAP adjustments actually fell in 2023 compared to 2022. The average total value of adjustments per company was $698 million, compared to $1.08 billion in 2022. The average adjustment itself, meanwhile, fell from $184 million to $110.8 million.

Now the good stuff: Who made the biggest adjustments? 

Our table below provides the answer. It lists the 10 companies that reported the largest total non-GAAP adjustments in 2023. 

Notice that seventh entry from General Electric ($GE) printed in red. GE did indeed have one of the largest non-GAAP adjustments we saw in 2023, but that adjustment was downward, pushing non-GAAP net income below GAAP net income. 

Indeed, among the 50 firms with the largest non-GAAP adjustments, three reported negative adjustments: General Electric, as well as APA Corp. ($APA) and Baxter International ($BAX). (You can download our full 50 companies list from DropBox if you’d like.)

Adjustments in Relative Terms

We also wanted to place all these non-GAAP adjustments in context. How many led to adjusted net income far above GAAP net income? How many led to adjusted net income below GAAP income, and so forth. 

To answer that question we composed this scatterplot, below. It charts how non-GAAP net income compared to GAAP net income for all 260 firms we studied this year. 

Bottom line: most companies did adjust non-GAAP net income upward, but most of the time that adjusted net income was still within 50 percent of GAAP net income. Rare were the outliers who pushed non-GAAP net income to several multiples above (or in two cases, below) GAAP income.