Last week Calcbench was delighted to attend a panel discussion at the Corporate Reporting Users Forum (CRUF), held in New York at the offices of Morgan Stanley. The panelists, who represented their own opinions and not those of their employers, offered a number of thought provoking ideas on the topic of the ‘non-GAAP gap.’

One thing that we found particularly noteworthy was brought up by Simon Flannery of Morgan Stanley, when he said that it would be very good if ‘firms filed their 10-Q within a day or two of the earnings release.’

So we set out to examine what the publishing behavior of firms is around the quarter end, the Form 8-K, and the publishing of the 10-Q. We examined 3,399 8-K and 10-Q pairs (aka firms) for second-quarter 2016. Discussion and results are below:

Background:

Sample: 3,399 firms with 8-Ks and 10-Q in the above period

On average 31.7 days from the quarter end until the 8-K is published

On average 35.7 days from the quarter end until the 10-Q is published.

Therefore the average delay between these filings is roughly 4 days.

Then we dug a little deeper.

We found that roughly half the population (55.6 percent) published their 8-K within 34 days of the quarter end. A small group waits until what looks like the last possible time to file. The table below illustrates that point. The number of days from quarter end is in the first column; the firm count and the percent of total are in the next two columns.The count and the percentage are running totals.

In the summary, we found that the average time that firms wait to file the 10-Q after they have filed their 8-K is 4 days. The next logical question answers Simon’s question directly: How many days between the two filings? The results are in the table below:

The 1,009 firms at the tail file their 10-Q an average of about 12 days after their 8-K!

Lastly, we asked the following question:

If a firm files its 8-K and 10-Q within 1 day of each other, is their original filing later than others?

The average days from the quarter end to the 10-Q filing for these firms is 35 days. Adding up the top two rows from the table above will give the sample (57 percent of total, or 1,392+562=1,954 firms).

Here is the summary table for the rest of the list.

Before we conclude anything, we always like to ask our readers if they have any questions. If so, please tweet @Calcbench, or email us at us@calcbench.com