Business Commons^™

Corporate Disclosure Of The Decision To Change The Fiscal Year-End, Thomas Porter, Edward Swanson, Michael Wilkins, Lori Holder-Webb

Michael S Wilkins

This paper investigates whether registrants comply with SEC rules designed to provide timely notification and transparent disclosure of the effects of a change in fiscal year-end. For a sample of 79 firms, the Form 8-K announcement of the change was filed late 25% of the time and no announcement was available for an additional 14% of the firms. In the subsequent Form 10-K, roughly half of the firms did not report operating results for both the transition period and a comparative period from the prior year, as required by the SEC. The rate of non-compliance was higher for firms audited …