Audit standard — rev. 1.0
How a score gets made.
TheRealMargin checks a company’s claimed savings against what its own public filings show — and flags the gap when one doesn’t match the other.
What we pull automatically
Four numbers come straight from SEC filings and update on their own as new reports post.
- 01
Revenue & profit margin
Top-line revenue and net income, pulled from the annual 10-K and combined into a net margin that shows how much of each dollar reaches the bottom line.
- 02
Executive pay
Total compensation disclosed in proxy statements (DEF 14A) and pay-versus-performance tables, so we can see how leadership was rewarded in the same period.
- 03
Stock buybacks
Share repurchases taken from the statement of cash flows — capital returned to shareholders rather than passed through to customers.
- 04
Staffing & headcount
Where a filer discloses headcount or staffing changes, we capture the direction of travel alongside the savings claim.
What we research by hand
A person manually checks public rate filings, the language of earnings calls, and other public statements to see whether the savings actually reached the customer. This part isn’t standardized enough to pull automatically yet, so it stays a human review for now.
How a company gets flagged
The numbers and the claim don’t line up. A company says savings were passed through, but the filing shows margin, pay, or buybacks moving the other way.
The numbers and the claim agree. The public filing is consistent with the savings actually reaching the customer.
The automatic data is in, but the manual check hasn’t been done yet. Most companies start here and stay here until a person reviews the filings.
What this isn’t
This is not a legal finding and not proof of wrongdoing. It can only score what’s public, so private companies with no filing requirement can’t be scored yet.
See it in action
The same numbers that feed every scorecard, aggregated across the fourteen companies we track.
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