Restatements in Financial Statements

[mysterion]

I am not sure if this is a normal practice due to my lack of experience in analyzing financial statements, but there seems that restatements in financial statements occur quite fairly in some companies.

Some of these restatements are not just minor changes in important figures such as net profit, operating cash flow, current assets but rather significant changes numerically wise.

To anyone familiar with these situations, is it a cause for concern (accounting fraud or just honest mistakes?) and should investors take the restated figures or original figures?

[freedom]

for properties companies, INT FRS 115 has been applied so they restated their finance statements.

[dzwm87]

a common restatement is for EPS or any figures on a per share basis. This can change if the company issue or buy back more shares.

[mysterion]

what about a restatement of revenues?

e.g. from 54 million to 173 million.

seems pretty absurd to me

[dzwm87]

Depends. As freedom had mentioned, a prop company switching to the INT FRS 115 ruling may have such drastic changes

[CityFarmer]

There are migrations of accounting standards to IFRS nowaday. Not all the public companies in SGX are doing it. If the company adopted the new accounting standard, then a re-statement is necessary, not an indicator for frault.

If you are concern, you can always refer to section "Significant Accounting Policies" in AR, to confirm any new accounting standard been followed.