Going for Growth

For the past three years, Corporate America has been nothing if not stingy. Stalled by sluggish demand, companies have slashed spending on new factories and equipment, salaries and bonuses, technology, benefits, and travel. They have exited unprofitable businesses and sold off nonstrategic assets...

By Joseph McCafferty • March 18, 2004

Companies Not Ready for Faster Filing

The Securities and Exchange Commission is phasing in new rules that by 2005 will require most companies to file their quarterly reports within 35 days and annual reports within 60 days after the period’s end. In 2002, most companies had 45 days to file their quarterlies and 90 days for their annu...

By Stephen Taub • March 17, 2004

Explore the Trendline➔

Tax policy shifts: What CFOs need to know to stay ahead

Discover how evolving tax policies are creating new opportunities and challenges for CFOs.

By CFO.com staff

Veritas Restates Three Years of Results

Veritas Software Corp. announced that it will restate its financials for the past three years as a result of an internal investigation, reported Reuters.The probe uncovered accounting practices not in compliance with generally accepted accounting principles during 2002, 2001, and prior periods. A...

By Stephen Taub • March 17, 2004

FASB to Weigh Effect of Medicare Act

The Financial Accounting Standards Board on Friday proposed guidelines for how companies should account for subsidies under the Medicare Act of 2003. The guidelines would enable investors to compare benefit-cost savings among companies more easily.Passed in December, the Medicare Act allows emplo...

By Stephen Taub • March 16, 2004

Bristol-Myers Restates Last Five Years

Drug maker Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. announced that it revised its fourth-quarter 2003 earnings upward, from $429 million to $506 million, and raised revenues, from $5.6 billion to $5.7 billion, to correct accounting errors.For the full year, the company reported earnings of $3.10 billion on reven...

By Stephen Taub • March 16, 2004

Less Ado about Options

The continuing brouhaha over a new accounting rule that would require expensing of employee stock options could amount to a tempest in a teacup, if an alternative valuation model is embraced by regulators and proves to be as accurate as advertised.To be sure, corporate lobbyists continue to compl...

By Craig Schneider • March 15, 2004

Nortel Restatement Could Stall 10-K

Nortel Networks will delay the filing of its 2003 annual report and that of Nortel Networks Limited (NNL), its main operating subsidiary, because it may need to restate its financials for the second time.North America’s largest maker of telephone equipment said its audit committee has been review...

By Stephen Taub • March 12, 2004

Smart-Card Fund Might Delay EchoStar

The Securities and Exchange Commission might require EchoStar to restate some previous financial results, according to the company. As a result, the satellite television company may seek a 15-day extension for filing its annual report for 2003.The SEC let EchoStar know that it over-accrued $17 mi...

By Stephen Taub • March 12, 2004

SEC Charges Former Conseco Finance Execs

The Securities and Exchange Commission said a former CFO and a former chief accounting officer were responsible for a fraudulent scheme to overstate earnings by “hundreds of millions of dollars” at a former subsidiary of Conseco.The charges came in a settlement announced Wednesday by the SEC. Con...

By Stephen Taub • March 12, 2004

El Paso May Restate Results

El Paso Corp. will delay the release of its fourth quarter 2003 earnings indefinitely because it will probably have to restate its results, according to the company. On February 17, the energy giant had revised its estimate of proven natural gas and oil reserves downward by the equivalent of abou...

By Stephen Taub • March 11, 2004

Tale of Two Investigations: Catalina, 99 Cents

The Securities and Exchange Commission has changed an informal investigation into the revenue-recognition policies of Catalina Marketing Corp. into a formal probe, according to the company.The probe is focusing mainly on the timing issues that company management has already identified at its Cata...

By Stephen Taub • March 11, 2004

Accounting Board OK’s Sarbanes 404 Rules

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) has approved new Sarbanes-Oxley Act rules governing how accounting firms will audit their clients’ internal controls when reviewing their financial statements.Under Section 404 of Sarbox, the management of a public company must assess the effe...

By Stephen Taub • March 10, 2004

Goodyear Disciplines Managers in Europe

Goodyear Tire & Rubber disciplined a number of senior managers in its European Union operation in the wake of an investigation into improper accounting in the company’s European and other overseas operations.The world’s largest tire company also found added accounting problems in its U.S. ope...

By Stephen Taub • March 10, 2004

San Juan: Cheapest Business Site

Thanks to low labor and tax costs, San Juan is the least expensive place to do business among 24 U.S. and U.S.-affiliated cities with populations over 1.5 million, according to a new study by KPMG LLP.Further, the Puerto Rican city was also the cheapest among 20 small and midsized cities studies ...

By Stephen Taub • March 9, 2004

KPMG Partners, Employees Probed

Federal prosecutors probing tax shelters sold by KPMG have notified about 30 of the accounting firm’s current and former partners and employees that they are “subjects” of the investigation, according to The Wall Street Journal.In at least a few cases, federal agents have delivered letters in per...

By Stephen Taub • March 8, 2004

Former Vari-L Execs Face Charges

Two former finance executives of the defunct Vari-L Co. Inc. have been criminally charged with falsifying information to inflate the company’s revenue, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Attorney for the District of Colorado.Former chief financial officer Jon Clark w...

By Stephen Taub • March 5, 2004

Sullivan Pleads Guilty; Ebbers Charged

Former WorldCom chief financial officer Scott Sullivan pleaded guilty to three criminal counts as part of the largest accounting fraud in U.S. history.His onetime boss, former chief executive officer Bernard Ebbers, faces the same three charges — conspiracy to commit securities fraud, securities ...

By Stephen Taub • March 3, 2004

IRS Aims to Soup Up Audits

The Internal Revenue Service is expediting its process for auditing corporate taxpayers, cutting the three-year examination time to 18 months by promoting electronic filing, narrowing the scope of its checkups, and encouraging its agents to initiate prefiling discussions about touchy issues. “Tax...

By Ilan Mochari • March 3, 2004

Former WorldCom CFO Pleads Guilty

Early this afternoon Scott Sullivan, the former finance chief at scandal-ridden telecommunications company WorldCom, agreed to plead guilty to three counts related to the accounting fraud at the company. Sullivan, who had held out for months despite the fact that several former WorldCom managers ...

By John Goff • March 2, 2004

Country Club Sues Deloitte, Audit Manager

A Florida country club has sued its accounting firm and an audit manager after losing approximately $1 million that was allegedly embezzled by a country-club employee.The San Jose Country Club in Jacksonville named as defendants Deloitte & Touche and an audit manager, Gabriele M. Beyer, accor...

By Stephen Taub • March 2, 2004

Accrual Accounting Raises U.S. Deficit

The nation’s budget deficit would rise dramatically if the U.S. government used the accrual method of accounting favored by Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan.The 2003 budget deficit came in at $374.8 billion — an amount figured using cash accounting, in which transactions are booked w...

By Stephen Taub • March 2, 2004

This Year’s Leap: Expensing Options

The Financial Accounting Standards Board will meet on Wednesday to consider whether and how companies should account for equity-based compensation on their financial statements.A year ago this month, FASB initiated a project to address issues related to equity-based compensation (EBC). One object...

By Stephen Taub • March 1, 2004

Haven or Hell?

On the day in early January when talks over a long-running tax dispute between Glaxo SmithKline and the Internal Revenue Service broke off, Glaxo’s share price fell nearly 2 percent. And no wonder. The IRS wants the U.K.-based pharmaceutical giant to cough up more than $5 billion in taxes, penalt...

By Ronald Fink • March 1, 2004

McKesson Must Share Internal Probe

The First District Court of Appeals has ruled that if a company shares the results of an internal investigation with the government, it must also share it with plaintiffs who have brought civil lawsuits against the company, according to The Recorder, a legal newspaper published in San Francisco.A...

By Stephen Taub • Feb. 26, 2004

Swartz: ”No New (York) Taxes”

Former Tyco International CFO Mark Swartz testified that he did not file New York State income tax returns in 1995, 1996, and 1997, even though his family lived in New York City and he worked there for part of the time.On Monday, Swartz said he was a resident of New Hampshire, where Tyco was base...

By Stephen Taub • Feb. 25, 2004