Are well-known companies more prone to financial statement fraud?

Last year the Financial Reporting Council, the U.K.’s financial watchdog, closed a multiyear investigation into financial statement fraud at retailer Tesco, putting an end to one of the country’s largest-ever accounting scandals.

In 2014, when the supermarket admitted to inflating profits in the first half of that year by 250 million pounds, the news sent Tesco’s stock tumbling and wiped billions of pounds off the company’s share value. Investors were naturally concerned.

After all, this was the U.K.’s biggest supermarket and a benchmark stock on the country’s FTSE 100 index — hardly a company where markets would expect to find these kinds of financial shenanigans. Renowned value investor Warren Buffett, who had a 4.1% stake in the retailer, said he’d made a “huge mistake” in placing Tesco stock in his portfolio. (See Warren Buffett: ‘Tesco was a huge mistake,’ by Julia Kollewe, The Guardian, Oct. 2, 2014.)

As the Tesco scandal attests, it isn’t necessarily corporations on the verge of bankruptcy that are most likely to cook their books, as some might think. Prestigious firms that are held in high regard are in fact the ones more prone to financial accounting fraud.