[비즈한국] Mirae Asset Global Investments has been found to have inflated its reported assets by approximately 1500 times after misclassifying Berkshire Hathaway shares in a stock holding report submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Although the error occurred in a single stock entry, the massive scale of the miscalculation caused the total reported value of Mirae Asset's 13F filing for that quarter to appear more than eight times larger than the actual figure. Mirae Asset corrected the filing about 100 days after the initial submission.
A review of the U.S. SEC’s Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR) system on the 13th revealed that Mirae Asset Global Investments submitted its 13F filing for the first quarter of this year on May 4. The reporting period covers holdings as of March 31. At the time, Mirae Asset reported 2,356 stock items with a total reported value of $299.33 billion.
The 13F is a quarterly report that institutional investment managers with investment discretion over $100 million or more in 13(f) securities must file with the SEC. It includes details such as stock names, share classes, quantity held, and market value, and must be filed within 45 days after the end of the quarter. Investors and the market widely use this data to track the portfolios of global institutional investors.
The problem stemmed from the Berkshire Hathaway entry. Mirae Asset reported holding 368,452 shares of Berkshire Hathaway, labeling them as "Class A (CL A)." The reported valuation for this position was a staggering $264.60 billion. Separately, the firm also reported holding 291 shares of Berkshire Hathaway Class B stock, valued at $139,447.
However, the 368,452 shares were actually Class B, not Class A. Mirae Asset submitted an amendment to its 13F filing with the SEC on the 12th (U.S. local time) to correct the error, approximately 100 days after the initial May 4 filing. Mirae Asset stated that the Berkshire Hathaway Class B holdings were incorrectly labeled as Class A during the Q1 13F reporting process and that the correction has been completed.
While Berkshire Hathaway Class A and Class B shares have similar names, there is a massive price difference between them. Berkshire Hathaway allows one Class A share to be converted into 1,500 Class B shares; consequently, the economic value ratio between Class A and Class B shares is approximately 1,500 to 1. Because Mirae Asset incorrectly entered the B shares as A shares, the number of shares held remained the same, but the valuation was inflated by about 1,500 times.
The error went beyond the valuation of a single Berkshire Hathaway entry, significantly distorting the entire reported scale. The total stock value reported by Mirae Asset in its initial 13F was $299.33 billion, of which the mislabeled $264.6 billion Berkshire Hathaway Class A valuation accounted for 88.4% of the total.
If one performs a simple recalculation based on the price of the 291 Class B shares also reported, the value of the 368,452 shares should be approximately $176.6 million. Compared to the erroneously reported $264.6 billion, the value was off by a factor of about 1,499. If this single correction is applied, Mirae Asset’s total Q1 13F reported value drops to approximately $34.9 billion—about one-eighth of the originally reported $299.3 billion. In essence, a single line item error regarding the share class of Berkshire Hathaway inflated the firm's total 13F reporting value by approximately 8.6 times.
In fact, back in May, some U.S. investment information providers took the SEC data at face value, reporting that Mirae Asset had newly acquired 368,452 shares of Berkshire Hathaway Class A worth $264.6 billion. Based on that disclosure, Mirae Asset’s stake in Berkshire Hathaway alone would have exceeded the entire stock portfolio of many global asset management firms.
It is also notable that the error went uncorrected for a long period. Mirae Asset submitted its Q2 13F on July 22, while the Q1 13F error was still live. The total reported value in the Q2 report was $67.66 billion. The report for the next quarter was filed about three weeks before the Q1 error was corrected.
This is not the first time Mirae Asset has corrected a 13F filing after submission. SEC records show that Mirae Asset also refiled its Q3 13F in November 2021. At the time, the company explained that the initial report contained incorrect holdings data as of June 30, so it replaced the entire data table with figures accurate as of September 30. The initial filing was made on November 5, 2021, and the amendment on the 15th of the same month.
There is no indication that this error affected actual investment operations or the valuation of client assets. It was a clerical error in the disclosure, misstating the class and associated valuation of Berkshire Hathaway stock. The SEC also explicitly states that it does not necessarily review or verify the accuracy and completeness of the information submitted in individual 13F filings.
However, since 13F data serves as a representative public source for tracking the U.S. stock holdings of institutional investors, and because this error significantly distorted not just one stock but the entire reported portfolio scale, the verification process for filings remains an area for improvement. Regarding the correction, Mirae Asset stated that it would make every effort to strengthen verification and management in the reporting process to ensure such errors do not occur again.