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Guide · Data quality

Financial restatements: when a company rewrites the past

A financial statement isn't carved in stone. Companies republish already-disclosed statements, changing numbers the market had already seen. The cruel part: the old version vanishes from the tools — and whoever decided based on it never learns it changed.

What a restatement is

After publishing a report, a company can reissue that same fiscal year with different numbers. It happens for many reasons: error correction, a change in accounting policy, an auditor or regulator requirement, or inconsistencies found later. In practice, the picture of the past gets rewritten.

Why it's dangerous for investors

The old version disappears. Almost every data tool keeps only the latest figure for each year. When a company restates, the original value is silently overwritten. The result: you can't tell that a profit, an equity or a debt figure changed — or by how much. And a large change in an already-published number is one of the most important red flags there is.

The case nobody forgets: Americanas

In January 2023, Americanas (AMER3) announced billions in "accounting inconsistencies," and the 2021 report ended up restated. In Brazil's public CVM data, 2021 shareholders' equity moves from positive to negative — a revision of tens of billions of reais:

Original (2021)
+R$ 15.9 bn
consolidated equity, as reported
Restated (2022 comparative)
−R$ 12.6 bn
the same year, rewritten

A gap of nearly R$ 29 billion in the same year. In most tools only the final number shows up — the original value, which many investors saw and used, simply evaporates from the history.

What Dados B3 does differently

We keep both versions. Every statement appears twice at the CVM: as "latest" (in that year's own file) and as "prior" (the comparative in the next year's file). When the two diverge by more than 0.5% on a key line, we log the restatement — old vs. new, side by side, tied to the source CVM account. Nothing is silently corrected. It's the only B3 data product that does this — and one reason the market should treat restatements as a signal, not a footnote.

Another, more technical example: Vale restated a 2022 cost line with a sign flip — the kind of thing that slips by unnoticed and distorts margins in any base that keeps only the latest version.

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