when a publicly traded company determines it needs to amend its financial statements it must file sec form 8 k within four days to notify investors of non reliance on previously issued financial statements it also needs to file amended 10 q forms for the affected quarters and possibly amended 10 ks depending on how many accounting periods are affected by the erroneous data 
companies should also provide a breakdown of how past errors occurred how they were corrected and whether there will likely be any future ramifications in their latest financial statements these comments usually appear in the footnotes special considerations