Supported document type
Detect tampered and deepfake Financial Statement
Financial statements tell a lender or investor how a business earns and what it owes, and they are altered to make it look bigger, more profitable, or less indebted. The statements are a web of ties: subtotals feed totals, profit flows to retained earnings, and notes explain the face figures. A changed number that was not carried through the web leaves the accounts out of balance, and the numbers set after the fact rarely match the rendering of the originals.
API slug: financial_statement
What a genuine financial statement contains
A full set contains a balance sheet, an income statement, a cash flow statement, and notes, often with an auditor's report and prior-year comparatives. The balance sheet lists assets, liabilities, and equity, the income statement runs from revenue to net profit, and the notes explain policies, breakdowns, and commitments. Audited sets carry the auditor's opinion, signature, firm name, and date.
The statements must agree with themselves. Assets equal liabilities plus equity, subtotals sum to totals, net income feeds retained earnings, and the closing cash in the cash flow equals the cash on the balance sheet. Prior-year comparatives should match last year's filed statements, and note breakdowns should sum to the face amounts. An auditor's report should be signed and dated after the year-end and before the release.
How financial statement forgeries are made
Revenue and profit inflation
Top-line and net profit figures are raised to support a loan or valuation. Retained earnings, tax, and cash flow no longer tie unless they were all rewritten, and edited digits show separate rendering.
Liability omission
Debts are dropped or reclassified to improve leverage. The balance sheet stops balancing, and the notes still describe the borrowings that the face no longer shows.
Comparative rewriting
Prior-year figures are changed to show growth that did not occur. They disagree with the previous year's statements already on file.
Auditor's report grafting
A clean opinion from another firm or year is attached to unaudited accounts. The report's signatory, date, and typography conflict with the pages around it.
What TamperCheck checks on a financial statement
TamperCheck runs 200+ forensic checks across three layers and returns a risk score from 0 to 100 with plain-English findings tied to specific regions of the document. These three carry the most weight on this document class.
Arithmetic reconciliation
Stated totals are recomputed from their components, and running or cumulative figures are checked for continuity across periods. A single edited value breaks the chain even when the page still looks right.
Table structure integrity
Inserted and deleted rows leave structural artifacts behind: inconsistent spacing, misaligned columns, and formatting the visible table no longer accounts for.
Signature forgery analysis
Signature regions are assessed for ink consistency and for how the stroke sits on the page, which distinguishes a genuine pen stroke from a pasted image of one.
And many more checks
The three above are the layers that carry the most weight on a financial statement. Every upload runs the full suite of 200+ checks regardless of document class, spanning file structure and metadata, pixel-level forensics, font and text rendering, optical and print characteristics, provenance signals, AI-generation signatures, and many more checks.
Who verifies a financial statement, and why
Lenders, investors, auditors, and due-diligence teams. In each case the document is being used to unlock money, access, or a legal status, which is exactly what makes it worth forging.
How to verify a financial statement in 4 steps
Check the fields against each other
Read revenue and profit, total assets and liabilities, and auditor's report together rather than one at a time. Forgers typically change one value and leave the rest of the document describing the original.
Inspect the file metadata
Open the document properties and look at the producer, creation date, and modification date. A document produced by a consumer PDF editor, or created long after the date printed on its face, is worth a closer look.
Ask for a second document
Request a corroborating document from the same issuer or an adjacent period. Forgery effort concentrates on one file, so inconsistencies surface as soon as there are two to compare.
Run a forensic check
Manual review catches obvious edits but not field-level pixel manipulation or synthetic generation. TamperCheck runs 200+ forensic checks on a financial statement and returns a risk score from 0 to 100 in about a minute, at $0.50 per document.
Frequently asked questions
How do lenders check whether financial statements were edited?
By testing that they foot and tie: the balance sheet balances, the notes support the face amounts, and last year's comparatives match last year's filed accounts. A forensic scan of the PDF then tests whether figures were altered after production.
How can I detect a fake balance sheet?
Check that assets equal liabilities plus equity, that subtotals sum, and that cash agrees with the cash flow statement and bank records. A document built from scratch also tends to show producer traits inconsistent with an accounting system or audit firm.
Do all financial statements have an auditor's report?
No. Small companies are often exempt from audit, and management accounts are never audited. A missing auditor's report is normal in those cases. An auditor's report from a firm that cannot be found, or dated before the year-end, is not.
Is a financial statement the same as an annual report?
The financial statements are the core of an annual report, but an annual report adds narrative, governance, and directors' commentary. Lenders often want the statements alone, which are the part that can be tested arithmetically.
TamperCheck analyses financial statement uploads with a hybrid forensic and AI pipeline tuned for this document class. Upload endpoints accept PDF and common image formats; class is inferred automatically. See the API documentation for authentication, async jobs, and webhooks.