Earnings Recast

You're directing a third-grade production of The Cow That Mooed. You originally cast little Timmy as the cow. But he couldn't get the moo right. No matter how much you berated him, no matter how much you tried to tap into his buried reservoirs of emotion, he wouldn't commit to the moo in a way that resonated on a spiritual level. Mostly, he just cried in the corner.

Time to recast. Maybe Suzy can do it.

Take that concept to the financial world, and you've got an earnings recast. A company made a mistake the first time it reported its financial figures. So it has to change them. The figures get recast...just like Timmy.

A company reports a profit of $2 million for the second quarter of 2015. Some time passes. It's now 2018 and an accountant is re-reading some old financial documents (for fun, as accountants are wont to do). He discovers a decimal error. The company really only made $200,000 for the second quarter of 2015.

So the company has to change the numbers for the quarter...the quarter that ended three years before. It has to let investors and regulators know about the mistake and report the real figure.

The process is called an earnings recast, or an earnings restatement. It's usually bad news, but a failure to make the restatement once a problem is discovered can lead to regulatory investigations, which are usually worse news.