Possibility Five:<p>5. The companies are incontinent. The rank and file neither know what GAAP or non-GAAP really are within their limited scope. To appease bosses that themselves have bosses, etc, they don&#x27;t &#x27;cook&#x27; the books, they rely on numbers that are fudged or optimistic from 3 divisions down the ladder and across the world and then fudge them some more.<p>Simple Example: If you have a 90% &#x27;truthfulness&#x27; data transmission rate things get bad quickly. Say I tell my 10 underlings to go get staplers. They then go tell their 10 underlings to go buy staplers, etc. If the transmission rate is 90%, then at the first step down I get 9 staplers, not 10. The next layer down I get 81+9 = 90 staplers from 110 folks. The next layer down I get 729+81+9 = 819 from 1,110 people. By layer 8, I am below a 50% data transmission rate to go get staplers. Granted there are now over 111,111,110 people working at the company then, but you get the idea.<p>Now bubble that upwards instead. Do you think that the folks there are giving a 90% truthfulness rate in what they tell their bosses? I know the situation is a lot more complicated and layers get jumped and the chain of command is not nearly so nice. Still, I think the point stands that the companies maybe are just dumb and it may just be their fate to be so.