Do you read the quarterly earnings releases put out by the companies whose stocks you own? Have you noticed all the so-called adjustments that help companies look better?

If you’re infuriated by them, you’ll love this Associated Press article detailing just how much this problem has grown. MarketWatch also listed nine ways companies try to fool you by adding nonsense to earnings press releases.

If a company experiences an extraordinary event, such as a merger, goodwill impairment charge or a regulatory fine, it is customary, and expected, for that quarter’s earnings press release to include adjusted figures that allow for easy comparison to prior periods. That makes sense because one-time events can obscure the underlying story.

But, as we have seen with Twitter Inc. TWTR, -0.62% , if the adjustment is being made to overlook a “noncash” expense, such as stock-based compensation to executives, investors had better pay heed to the GAAP figures as well. Why? Because the shoveling of newly issued shares to executives dilutes other shareholders’ ownership. That lowers earnings per share. (In the case of Twitter, that might be overlooked by analysts and investors because the company is unprofitable.)

Sticking with our Twitter example, the company reported a first-quarter GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) net loss of $162 million. After making several adjustments, including $183 million in stock-based compensation, the company said adjusted net income came to $47 million. By the way, that stock-based compensation added up to a whopping 42% of revenue for the quarter.

We detailed just how harmful the “non-cash” stock-based compensation to executives can be when we reviewed the company’s lousy first-quarter results.

Getting back to the AP article, the reporter cited data provided by S&P Capital IQ showing that 72% of 500 major companies had reported adjusted profits higher than their GAAP profits. That was pretty much unchanged from five years earlier. However, “adjusted earnings were typically 16% higher than net income in the most recent period versus 9% five years ago.”

So that’s an irritating trend. More than ever, investors who wish to understand what’s really going on have to do some serious digging.

These companies are doing it the most

We took our own look at earnings data provided by FactSet for 439 publicly traded U.S. companies with market values of more than $10 billion.

For starters, it’s important to point out that percentage differences between the reported GAAP earnings and adjusted earnings cannot always be calculated. For example, if the GAAP earnings figure is negative, but the adjusted figure is positive, a percentage calculation is meaningless.

So we isolated companies that had done one of these three things:

Reported positive GAAP earnings, with adjusted net income at least 50% higher.

Reported a GAAP net loss, with an adjusted net loss at least 50% lower.

Reported a GAAP net loss, with positive adjusted earnings.

For the most recent quarter, 94 of the 439 companies had done one of the above.

To pare our list to a reasonable number of companies, we looked back two years to arrive at 15 that had done one of those three things for eight straight quarters:

Here are the 15 U.S. companies with market values of over $10 billion with extreme positive differences between adjusted earnings and GAAP earnings over the past eight quarters:

The list is sorted so that the companies showing the largest increases in net income are up top. These are followed by Tesla Motors Inc., which said its adjusted loss was 85% lower than its GAAP net loss, followed by the companies that went from negative GAAP earnings to positive adjusted earnings.

Yes, we’ve shown only the most recent quarter’s data, but those companies are the poster children for repeated massive adjustments to earnings in their earnings press releases.

Extra credit

A “special merit award” goes to Palo Alto Networks Inc. PANW, +0.41% , which has reported negative GAAP earnings, but positive adjusted earnings, for eight straight quarters.

Among our group of 439 U.S. companies with market values above $10 billion, only two have reported negative GAAP earnings, but positive adjusted earnings, for four straight quarters: Palo Alto Networks and Twitter.