Ghost assets aren’t caused by bad teams. They’re caused by a verification model that checks once a year and calls it done.
Source: CFOtech / TechDay Network coverage of SoloTruth ARM launch, April 2026
Ask how much of a typical fixed asset register is wrong and a confident range comes back. Ten to thirty percent is the figure that circulates. Trace it and it thins out quickly. The number repeats from publication to publication, and the trail ends at one consultancy’s unpublished experience with no sample size, no method and no date attached. We went looking for a fixed asset prevalence study that discloses how it was measured. We did not find one.
That absence is worth sitting with, because it is the same problem one level up. Nobody can tell you how wrong the average register is for exactly the reason your own register is wrong: almost nobody goes and looks.
What does exist is specific findings at named companies. Kroll’s fixed asset register health check found that more than 15 percent of recorded assets at one manufacturing client were no longer in service. One engagement, not an industry rate, and more useful than the range precisely because somebody counted.
The question worth asking is why this keeps happening.
The common assumption is that ghost assets result from poor data hygiene, undertrained staff, or inadequate systems. Fix the process, the thinking goes, and the records will clean up.
That assumption is wrong. The problem is structural.
An ERP records a financial transaction at the point of purchase. It logs the asset, assigns a value, and begins depreciating it according to a schedule. From that point forward, the system assumes the asset exists, is in the recorded location, and is in the condition the book value implies.
The ERP has no mechanism to verify any of that. It was not designed to. ERP systems are systems of financial record. They are not systems of physical verification.
So the gap opens. Not suddenly. Incrementally.
An asset moves to another facility without a transfer entry. A piece of equipment gets cannibalized for parts during a repair. A machine is retired when a newer model arrives, but the disposal never makes it into the system. Each event is individually routine. Collectively, they widen the distance between what the register says and what you would actually find if you walked the floor today.
Most organizations respond to this problem with an annual physical inventory or fixed asset audit. An internal team, or an external firm, samples the register and reconciles what they find against what’s recorded.
This approach has three problems.
First, it’s a sample. No organization audits 100 percent of its fixed assets annually. The standard is a statistically significant subset. Ghost assets in the unsampled portion remain on the books.
Second, it’s retrospective. By the time the audit happens, the inaccurate data has already influenced depreciation calculations, insurance coverage, capital planning, and financial reporting for the prior period. The audit finds the error. It does not undo the downstream effects.
Third, it resets to zero. The day after the audit closes, assets start moving again. The cycle restarts. By the time next year’s audit arrives, the gap has widened again.
The annual audit is not a solution to register drift. It is a periodic glimpse at how bad the drift has become.
The financial consequences distribute across line items in ways that make them easy to overlook individually.
Depreciation continues on assets that no longer exist, overstating both asset values and expenses. Insurance premiums are paid on assets that were scrapped years ago. Capital budgets request replacement equipment that, in some cases, still exists on another floor of the same facility. Tax liabilities are miscalculated in both directions.
Across a $100 million asset base with a 15 percent register discrepancy, our own model puts the combined annual cost of those effects between $1.45 million and $4.05 million. That is a modelled figure built from published audit-fee, insurance, property-tax and capital-planning rates, not a measured customer result, and every input in it is open to challenge.
Results illustrative only. Actual outcomes vary by implementation.
For public companies, the stakes include more than efficiency. ASC 360 requires impairment recognition when evidence shows an asset’s carrying value exceeds its fair value. If a piece of equipment has been damaged or idled for 18 months and the ERP still carries it at book value, the company may have a mandatory impairment event it does not know about yet.
The answer to a structural problem is a structural fix, not a better annual process.
SoloTruth ARM was built on this premise. Rather than auditing assets periodically and reconciling after the fact, the platform creates a continuous evidence layer above the ERP. Physical assets are verified on an ongoing basis through a combination of RFID and GPS signals, mobile inspection workflows, and document processing. Every verification event produces a timestamped, geo-tagged record that links directly to the corresponding asset in the financial system.
When a discrepancy is found, it does not wait for the annual audit to surface it. The Axon Ivy orchestration layer routes the correction through the appropriate approval workflow and posts the result to the ERP. The financial record updates based on verified evidence, not assumed continuity.
For years, the industry has operated on an implicit assumption: that the ERP’s fixed asset register, updated at acquisition and depreciated on schedule, provides an adequate basis for asset valuations and financial reporting.
It does not. It provides a record of what was true at the time of purchase. Everything that happened after purchase, which is most of what determines current value and existence, is assumed rather than verified.
SoloTruth ARM exists to correct that assumption. Not with a better audit. With continuous proof.
Coverage: SoloTruth launches asset platform to tackle ghost assets, CFOtech / TechDay Network, April 2026
Source: Kroll Advisory, “Invisible Risks, Measurable Returns: The New Case for a Strong Fixed Asset Register,” December 9, 2025 (Masha Lewis), for the single-client health check finding cited above.
Learn more: solotruth.com