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.