There is an entire cottage industry of firms that will do nothing but look for ways to use these types of procedural errors to extract money from companies.
There are law firms whose sole form of income is to have hedge funds send them their daily trades so they can cross reference them against companies who had to restate earnings, the implication being that if hedge fund A owned some stock during the period where the firm had released the improper numbers and when the firm refiled then the fund can claim they were fraudulently mislead into buying the shares even though the refiling might not have mattered at all.
As to the second part of the story about private companies, this is something that alot of people are trying to figure out.
The last 5 years have been defined by private companies "disrupting" things where they try to have their cake and eat it to.
- Want to be a taxi when it works for you but don't want all the rules, regulations, laws and taxes taht go along with it? No problem, just pretend there are no such thing as taxi laws.
- Want the benefit of people to work and the ability to define how they do their job for you but don't want to bother yourself with things like payroll taxes, workers comp payments, no problem just declare that you don't have contractors or employees but some new form of worker. The IRS just ins't smart enough to see your vision...
Now we have companies who want the benefits of being public
- access to capital as they need it
- ability for founders to cash out their shares
- rising share prices to entice employee's with so they won't focus on the below market wage you pay.
but don't want to petty baggage that goes along with it:
- how dare someone short my company and point out its flaws
- I and only I will pick my share holders,
- I don't want to release earnings of any kind to my shareholders, I only want true believers who won't worry about things like profit.
- Why are people asking about earnings, just look at my growth numbers and those numbers only.
I think most people agree that there needs to be some reform to make it easier for companies to go public but if companies think that being "disruptive" is a technique that will work with the SEC, then that's one battle I don't think silicon valley will win.
Or put another way, for all of Silicon Valley's impact over the past 50 years, its had about zero impact on the process of companies going public. When companies go public they all play ball by Wall Street and the SEC's rules.