A public US company files three kinds of periodic reports with the SEC, and a 10-Q sits in the middle of them by both size and audit standard. Form 10-K is the annual one: audited financial statements plus a full description of the business, filed once a year. Form 10-Q is filed for each of the other three quarters, and investor.gov’s own description of it is specific about what that skips: it “includes unaudited financial statements and information about the company’s business and results for the previous three months and for the year to date,” and it compares the current quarter and year-to-date figures “to the same periods in the previous year.” No 10-Q is filed after the fourth quarter; that quarter’s numbers arrive folded into the annual 10-K instead, audited alongside the rest of the year.
Unaudited doesn’t mean unchecked. A 10-Q still goes through a company’s internal controls and its auditor’s quarterly review procedures, which are narrower than a full annual audit but not nothing; it means the figures haven’t been through the complete audit opinion process a 10-K’s numbers get, and that a restatement of quarterly numbers, while it happens, is a different and generally less severe event than a restatement of audited annual figures. The 10-Q’s structure mirrors the 10-K’s in miniature: financial statements first, then management’s discussion and analysis of the quarter’s results, then updates to risk factors and legal proceedings if anything material changed since the last filing. A Form 8-K sits alongside both, for anything material enough that the company can’t wait for the next scheduled report to disclose it.
Companies based outside the US that qualify as foreign private issuers follow a different calendar entirely. They file neither 10-Ks nor 10-Qs. Instead, the SEC’s Financial Reporting Manual explains, a foreign private issuer reports annually on Form 20-F, due within four months of its fiscal year end, and rather than quarterly reports it furnishes a Form 6-K whenever it makes information public at home or discloses it to a stock exchange, “material information” distributed to shareholders or required under the issuer’s home country’s laws. That means a 6-K isn’t filed on a fixed schedule the way a 10-Q is; it’s furnished on whatever cadence the issuer’s home market’s own disclosure rules already require, which can be more frequent or less regular than the US quarterly calendar, depending on the country. A publisher headquartered in Japan or South Korea reporting to US investors as a foreign private issuer is a 20-F and 6-K filer, not a 10-K and 10-Q one, and comparing its disclosure calendar directly against a US-based competitor’s is comparing two different systems, not two versions of the same one.
Investor.gov’s overview of public company reporting also lists the other filings that round out the picture: proxy statements, which cover shareholder votes on board elections, executive pay and proposed mergers, and additional disclosures required for events like insider securities transactions or a stake reaching 5% of a company’s outstanding shares. None of these replace a 10-Q. Reading one well means reading it as what it is: an unaudited progress report on the three months since the last one, measured against the same three months a year before, with the full audited picture still to come at year end.