How Did You Manage That, Altria?

In 2000, General Electric posted its 100^th consecutive quarter of growth in continuing operations. That's 25 years. Raise your hand if that sounds just a bit suspicious. Whatever business you're in, that feat just isn't possible unless your company's managing its reported earnings.

According to a 1998 survey, 78% of CFOs attending a given conference said they'd been asked to "cast financial results in a better light" without running afoul of GAAP. Half said they'd done it. Nearly half said they'd been asked to misrepresent their company's numbers, and 38% admitted they'd done so. Another survey at a different conference found that more than half of the CFOs attending had been asked to juice their numbers, and 17% had agreed to do so.

It's easy to understand why companies succumb to the incredible pressure to make it look like they've met or beaten targets or Wall Street expectations. Consistent growth is a feather in any CEO's cap, and a rising stock price often increases many executives' compensation, especially from stock options. But when companies stray from merely managing their numbers within GAAP into outright fudging them -- Enron, Sunbeam, we're looking at you here -- they can ruin themselves and their shareholders.

How can we spot suspicious earnings patterns soon enough to save ourselves? We can track how closely a company meets earnings expectations, monitor its frequency of year-over-year growth, and compare those stats to numbers from a few competitors, which should be affected similarly by changes in the business cycle. Any company that lands eerily close to earnings-per-share (EPS) expectations, and grows earnings year over year with unusual reliability, should raise a yellow flag and invite us to look closer.

Here's a look at what Altria (NYSE: MO), the tobacco company, has done over the past few years. I've also included a couple of other businesses playing in the same space for comparison.

Source: Earnings.com and author calculation. Difference in number of quarters counted due to data source.

Altria came within $0.02 two times out of three for the past six and a half years. And over the past five and a half years, it reported yearly growth more than half the time. Being such a long-established company, it's probably an old hand at managing expectations, but investors should double-check just in case -- especially since Reynolds had a much worse record of hitting estimates. Switching competitors to the alcohol side of Altria's business, Constellation Brands seems just as adept at hitting estimates and reporting yearly growth. Yes, tobacco and alcohol are usually long-term stable businesses, but Foolish investors will take a second look at their numbers, just to set their minds at rest.

Note that I'm not concentrating on managing estimates here -- though management does that, too. However, if a management team always seems to deliver on estimates time and time again, you should probably dig a bit deeper, to see whether its interpretation of GAAP is getting a bit too fast and loose.

Investors crave consistency. That's one reason why its string of reliable results spurred GE's stock price to rise so much in the 1980s and 1990s. But the real world isn't consistent, and Foolish investors should account for that. If a company's results seem too steady to be true, Fools should proceed with caution.

If you'd like to learn more about how we go about investigating companies chosen for our Motley Fool Stock Advisor newsletter service, consider a 30-day free trial, today.