Two dozen of the largest companies in the United States are expected to have missed yesterday's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) deadline requiring CEOs and CFOs to vouch for their company's financial statements.
According to reports in the Washington Posttoday, others were obliged to restate financial results or otherwise came clean to comply with toughened corporate accountability rules.
One company - Illinois-based consumer finance company Household International - said it had overstated its profits by $386 million over nine years. Household said the changes it made were the result of a review by auditor KPMG.
Other companies said they made small errors in arithmetic, and some said they were adopting more conservative bookkeeping and disclosure policies to assure investors they were not hiding anything.
"This is the government's way of walking through the business community and saying 'Bring out your dead'," Mr Patrick McGurn, vice president of Institutional Shareholder Services, is quoted as saying in the Post.
SEC Chairman Mr Harvey L. Pitt announced the certification requirement at the end of June following corporate accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom.
The SEC order applies to 947 companies - about 700 of those had a filing deadline of yesterday because of when their fiscal year ends.