Resolving the Missing Financial Data Crisis: A Generative AI Pipeline for SEC 10-K Extraction

As organizations increasingly integrate AI-powered question-answering systems into financial information systems for compliance, risk assessment, and decision support, ensuring the factual accuracy of AI-generated outputs becomes a critical engineering challenge. Current Knowledge Graph (KG)-augmented QA systems lack systematic mechanisms to detect hallucinations - factually incorrect outputs that undermine reliability and user trust. We introduce FinBench-QA-Hallucination, a benchmark for evaluating hallucination detection methods in KG-augmented financial QA over SEC 10-K filings. The dataset contains 755 annotated examples from 300 pages, each labeled for groundedness using a conservative evidence-linkage protocol requiring support from both textual chunks and extracted relational triplets. We evaluate six detection approaches - LLM judges, fine-tuned classifiers, Natural Language Inference (NLI) models, span detectors, and embedding-based methods under two conditions: with and without KG triplets. Results show that LLM-based judges and embedding approaches achieve the highest performance (F1: 0.82-0.86) under clean conditions. However, most methods degrade significantly when noisy triplets are introduced, with Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) dropping 44-84 percent, while embedding methods remain relatively robust with only 9 percent degradation. Statistical tests (Cochran's Q and McNemar) confirm significant performance differences (p < 0.001). Our findings highlight vulnerabilities in current KG-augmented systems and provide insights for building reliable financial information systems, where hallucinations can lead to regulatory violations and flawed decisions. The benchmark also offers a framework for integrating AI reliability evaluation into information system design across other high-stakes domains such as healthcare, legal, and government.

Financial analysts face significant challenges extracting information from lengthy 10-K reports, which often exceed 100 pages. This paper presents a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system designed to answer questions about S&P 500 financial reports and evaluates the impact of neural reranking on system performance. Our pipeline employs hybrid search combining full-text and semantic retrieval, followed by an optional reranking stage using a cross-encoder model. We conduct systematic evaluation using the FinDER benchmark dataset, comprising 1,500 queries across five experimental groups. Results demonstrate that reranking significantly improves answer quality, achieving 49.0 percent correctness for scores of 8 or above compared to 33.5 percent without reranking, representing a 15.5 percentage point improvement. Additionally, the error rate for completely incorrect answers decreases from 35.3 percent to 22.5 percent. Our findings emphasize the critical role of reranking in financial RAG systems and demonstrate performance improvements over baseline methods through modern language models and refined retrieval strategies.

Financial question answering over U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings requires retrieving and synthesizing heterogeneous evidence dispersed across long, standardized, and highly redundant disclosures. Existing retrieval-augmented and multi-agent systems typically derive retrieval queries directly from the user's question and rank candidates by semantic similarity. Together, these choices create prior-corpus misalignment: a mismatch between model priors and the target filings' structure, terminology, and evidence standards. As a result, query generation misses corpus-specific evidence, while semantic reranking favors topically similar but evidentially invalid false-positive chunks. We propose FinSAgent, an evidence-grounded multi-agent framework that reframes SEC filing QA as corpus-aligned retrieval planning and corrects both ends with a single principle: inject corpus-side conditioning wherever model priors would otherwise dominate. FinSAgent combines (1) role-specialized agents anchored to the mandated 10-K item structure, (2) database-aware query decomposition that conditions each agent's sub-queries on a lightweight, summary-level view of the local corpus, and (3) multi-path retrieval with a learned feature-gated reranker that separates evidential validity from semantic similarity. Across five offline financial QA benchmarks, FinSAgent improves retrieval coverage and answer correctness over strong single-agent and multi-agent baselines; in a three-arm randomized online experiment with 1,000 anonymous user ratings, it also receives higher scores than baselines.