5. The companies are incontinent. The rank and file neither know what GAAP or non-GAAP really are within their limited scope. To appease bosses that themselves have bosses, etc, they don't 'cook' the books, they rely on numbers that are fudged or optimistic from 3 divisions down the ladder and across the world and then fudge them some more.

Simple Example: If you have a 90% 'truthfulness' data transmission rate things get bad quickly. Say I tell my 10 underlings to go get staplers. They then go tell their 10 underlings to go buy staplers, etc. If the transmission rate is 90%, then at the first step down I get 9 staplers, not 10. The next layer down I get 81+9 = 90 staplers from 110 folks. The next layer down I get 729+81+9 = 819 from 1,110 people. By layer 8, I am below a 50% data transmission rate to go get staplers. Granted there are now over 111,111,110 people working at the company then, but you get the idea.

Now bubble that upwards instead. Do you think that the folks there are giving a 90% truthfulness rate in what they tell their bosses? I know the situation is a lot more complicated and layers get jumped and the chain of command is not nearly so nice. Still, I think the point stands that the companies maybe are just dumb and it may just be their fate to be so.