Can’t tell what was going on in their minds, but they had so many papers and thus little incentive to cheat, so it was probably careless mistakes.
Maybe so, but if that's the case then ALL of their papers might contain careless mistakes.
"Will the real specification please stand up?" discredits accounting paper
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This EJW article takes down a case exactly like SKAB, but also analyzes the fraud in articles not yet retracted.
https://econjwatch.org/articles/the-stewart-retractions-a-quantitative-and-qualitative-analysis
Any EJMR up to do it? I bet you would find the same issues