Even without such details, the analysts felt they had enough to try the SEC's program.
Their suspicions turned into near-certainty when in May 2013, Orthofix missed its first quarter earnings targets, reporting a 14 percent year-over-year drop in net sales that sent its share price tumbling 15 percent.
"That was when the light bulb really goes off," the analyst who first started watching the company said.
By then the two had already contacted Jordan Thomas, an attorney at the law firm Labaton Sucharow, which specializes in class action litigation and also takes on a limited number of whistleblower cases.
The law firm gets paid for its services from a portion of the award, but it does not publicly disclose its share.
A Tip And A Follow-Up
In June 2013, Thomas submitted a tip to the SEC on his clients' behalf, promising to follow up with a more detailed submission, records show.
To bolster their case the analysts kept picking through the Orthofix's financial statements, while Labaton's investigators, led by a former FBI agent, hit the phones and scouted industry message boards looking for former Orthofix employees.
One former employee they found revealed in an interview that in order for them to "make their numbers," the company sent large orders to distributors, only to have them returned and then reshipped to other customers, according to the updated submission Labaton send to the SEC in August.
The update included the analysts' estimates by how much Orthofix would need to lower their earnings and sales for 2011 and 2012. Those numbers later turned out to be right in line with what the company ultimately restated in 2014 and 2015.