Catch the financial-statement changes companies hope you’ll miss.
GAAP Sentinel detects when public companies quietly change how they tag financial-statement line items — a potential signal of earnings manipulation.
10 years of filings · every line item · the XBRL tag behind it
Search any U.S. public company
Type a ticker or name. First lookup ingests 10 years of filings (usually 20–40 seconds); after that it’s instant.
Try AAPL · NVDA · COST
From ticker to red flag in one search
Every step runs on primary-source SEC data — no estimates, no scraping summaries.
Search a company
Find any U.S. public company by ticker or name — backed by the SEC ticker registry.
Pull 10 years of filings
We fetch a decade of 10-K and 10-Q filings for that company directly from SEC EDGAR.
Parse every line item
Each line is parsed with the exact XBRL concept (taxonomy tag) behind the number, not just the label.
Flag suspicious changes
We compare tags across years and flag when a line switches to a non-standard, company-custom tag.
A standard tag, quietly swapped for a custom one
On its balance sheet, NVIDIA re-tagged “Marketable securities” from a standard US-GAAP concept to a company-specific (nvda:) extension. Custom tags can’t be compared apples-to-apples against peers or prior years — the kind of change that’s easy to miss by eye, and exactly what GAAP Sentinel surfaces.
Re-tagged from a standard us-gaap concept to a company-extension (custom) concept — evades standardized comparison.
detected via positional_continuity · NVIDIA Corp · CIK 0001045810
What is a taxonomy switch?
Every number in a U.S. public company’s financial statements is tagged with a standardized XBRL concept — for example us-gaap:MarketableSecuritiesCurrent. Those standard tags are what let software and analysts compare one company to another, and this year to last.
A taxonomy switch is when the same economic line gets a differenttag over time. Sometimes that’s routine — the whole market re-tagged revenue when the ASC 606 standard changed, and GAAP Sentinel keeps those quiet.
But switching from a standard tag to a company-custom one— or flip-flopping between tags year after year — breaks comparability and can obscure how a number really moved. That’s worth a closer look, and it’s easy to miss reading filings by hand.
Routine — stays quiet
us-gaap → us-gaap re-tags (e.g. the ASC 606 revenue migration) are recognized as standards changes and down-ranked, so they don’t bury the real signal.
Suspicious — flagged HIGH
A jump to a company-specific (custom) tag can’t be compared against peers or prior years — the highest-signal case the detector elevates.
Unstable — summarized
A line that flips between tags repeatedly is summarized as one “unstable tagging” finding instead of a wall of noise.
Start with a company you know
Pull a decade of its filings and see how consistently it tags its own numbers.