How we verify every number

Every balance sheet must satisfy Assets = Liabilities + Equity. It is not a statistic, it is double-entry bookkeeping. A filing that does not balance has an error — either in the filing, or in how we read it — and this page says which, for every company we cover.

What the check found

6,221companies covered
4,906reconciled — balanced, or balanced once noncontrolling interests or mezzanine equity are included
215flagged with a specific reason
0silently fudged

1,100 more report no complete set of totals, so there is no identity to test. They are excluded rather than counted as passes.

Every flag, named

CategoryFilingsWhat it means Examples
Missing XBRL tag202We could not read a component the filing contains. Ours, not theirs.BLK, BAM, CYH
Rounding4The two sides differ by under 1% of total assets — presentation slack, not error.—
Unexplained9The filer published no stated total to referee against. Under investigation.MSC
Genuinely broken filing0The filer's own stated total does not match their own assets. Their arithmetic, not ours.—

Why there is no percentage here

The denominator moves as we improve coverage. In one week we restored 31 companies that had been silently unreachable — and the pass rate went down, because the newly visible filings were the awkward ones. A number that falls when quality rises is not a quality measure, it is a moving target. So we publish the raw counts, and we update them as gaps close.

These figures are read from the database when this page renders. They are not copied into the page by hand, and they change when the data does.

How the accounting-identity check works

Assets = Liabilities + Equity is not a rule filers follow. It is a consequence of double-entry bookkeeping — which is exactly what makes it usable as a test on data you did not produce.

Why the number is not 100%

Because the identity is an identity, a correctly tagged filing read on the right terms satisfies it exactly. So a pass rate is not a measure of how good the data is. It means that for a small number of filings we cannot reconcile the two sides, and the honest thing is to say which and why rather than to round the number up.

Every miss is one of two things. Either the filing is not being read on the terms it was written on — their arithmetic is fine and our reading is wrong — or we failed to pull something the filing contains. A third case, the filer's own arithmetic being wrong, is possible and should be vanishingly rare for an audited public company.

The four reasons

Noncontrolling interests. A consolidated company can report the parent's equity and the noncontrolling interest as two separate lines with no combined total. The identity that filing was written on is A = L + E + NCI, and testing A = L + E against it flags a perfectly sound filing. Where this happens the drawing says "balances as A = L + E + noncontrolling interest" and names both figures. Nothing is adjusted; the two lines are added, and you are told they were.

Mezzanine equity. Redeemable preferred stock and similar instruments sit between liabilities and equity — neither one, by design. Airlines, biotechs and companies that came public through a SPAC carry it often. We do not currently read these tags. When one of these filings does not reconcile, that is our gap and not the filer's, and it is the next thing on the list to fix.

Rounding. Figures are reported in millions. A one-unit difference on a balance sheet of a few hundred billion is eight decimal places of nothing, and a gap under a percent of total assets is treated as the noise it is.

A filing that genuinely does not balance. It happens. When a filer's own stated total does not match their own assets, no parser fixes that, and pretending otherwise would mean publishing a number the company never filed. The drawing shows the figures as reported, states the gap as a percentage, and says so.

How we tell them apart

Guessing which category a failure belongs to would make the whole exercise worthless. One field settles it: LiabilitiesAndEquity, the filer's own stated right-hand side. Where a company publishes it, we can ask two questions instead of one — does the filing balance against its own figures, and did we recover everything it put there?

If the filing balances against itself and our sum falls short, the missing amount is a line we did not ingest, and the fault is ours. If the filing does not balance against its own stated total, that is the filer's arithmetic. Where a company publishes no stated total, the honest answer is that we do not know, and it is recorded as unexplained rather than assigned to whichever bucket flatters us.

What we will not do

Plug the gap. A figure adjusted until the columns agree is no longer what the company filed, and what the company filed is the entire product. Every number on this site is as reported, and where the two sides do not meet you get the gap, the size of it, and the reason — not a tidier number.