Meanwhile, another 2016 survey, of about 400 public and private company CFOs, found that they didn't entirely trust their peers. Poll respondents were asked what percent of companies, in any given year, were misrepresenting their economic performance. The average overall answer was about 20 percent, though when looking at private company CFOs only, that guess jumped to 30 percent. When asked to estimate the scale of these manipulations, CFOs believed that misrepresentations accounted for 10 cents out of every dollar of reported earnings figures from these companies.