The sample includes restatements disclosed between January 1, 1997 and December 31, 2006 collected by the
Government Accountability Office (GAO). Since this paper examines illegal insider trading during periods of accounting
misstatements, the appropriate sample should include restatements that are intentional or known to the top managers
and have a significant price effect. In an attempt to capture only these restatements, the initial sample includes
restatements due to allegedly intentional GAAP violations of revenue recognition rules.
10
Prior evidence suggests that
revenue recognition misstatements are most common, most severe (Anderson and Yohn, 2002) and most significantly
related to the incidence of litigation (Francis et al., 1998; Palmrose and Scholz, 2004) and AAER (Feroz et al., 1991).
Therefore, managers of firms that violate revenue recognition rules are more likely to have knowledge of these violations
and trade on them. This selection procedure provides a total of 224 accounting irregularities.