Beneish Model
  
It's like a lie detector for financial results. The Beneish model is a series of ratios and other calculations that signal how suspicious a company's financial statements are. Score a high Beneish M-Score, and it's likely your company is cooking the books.
The model was published in the late 1990s by a professor named M. Daniel Beneish, a faculty member at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. The details of the calculations are fairly complicated, but it involves a series of indices produced by comparing different financial measures at the company. Some components include an index of sales growth, a ratio of total accruals to total assets and an index of asset quality.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is Asymmetric Information?25 Views
Finance allah shmoop what is asymmetric information Well asymmetry happens
when two sides of something aren't equal think giant red
wood and we'd regular crab and fiddler crab recumbent bike
and a eunice cycle well in the financial world asymmetric
information exists when one side of a transaction think inside
trader scumbag who collects briefcases full of cash from somalia
in overlords versus a normal joe six pack investor trying
to fairly participate in the stock market So he has
a pension to retire on while bouncing great grandchildren on
his newly installed robotic knees Well discount needs don't go
there Your summer college job is cleaning the house of
the ceo of whatever dot com currently trading at eighteen
bucks a share as you empty her garbage one night
pushing away adult diapers in the process Yes she has
a lot of pressure on the job on this conference
calls and saying ooh a lot I push that away
You realize that microsoft is buying her company for thirty
dollars a share You then by a ton of stock
at eighteen bucks you had a symmetric information because you
dug through the trash and you found the memo from
whoever the ceo is of microsoft these days to her
and that was bad You didn't have to act on
that information like you could have just done a whole
lot of nothing and not repeated it to anyone and
left the stock at eighteen dollars until it was all
in the news at thirty and moved on and still
have your job cleaning her trash Having inside information isn't
illegal but doing something to benefit yourself tor You know
your loved ones is illegal So if you trade based
on inside asymmetric information well then you just committed a
felony It's called insider trading And while here's hoping you
look good and either orange or black or or both
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