ANTHONY H. CATANACH JR. is an associate professor in the School of Business at Villanova University, as well as the Cary M. Maguire Fellow at the American College Center for Ethics in Financial Services. His professional experience includes five years as an audit manager with KPMG and six years in the financial services industry. Dr. Catanach has received numerous awards for his publication, teaching, and curriculum innovation efforts. He has authored numerous articles on a variety of accounting, finance, and management issues, as well as several business education texts..
The case against three former executives at Nortel is coming to an end. Their actions have been characterized as a “fraud on the public” by the Canadian prosecutors during their closing statements. These managers at Nortel Networks Corporation allegedly used accounting tricks to buoy quarterly profits and activate various bonuses for themselves. Linda Nguen quotes [...]
Oct 082012
Sep 172012
As you may recall, we previously discussed problems in government pension accounting (see “California Budget Woes and Chimerical Pension Beliefs: GASB Could Help if it Had the Will”). In this essay we turn our attention to corporate pension accounting, pension expense specifically, using Weyerhaeuser disclosures as an example.
Monday September 10 Groupon named a new Chief Accounting Officer, Brian Stevens, formerly a partner with KPMG. The question, of course, is whether this move is enough to save face with the investment community, after the many fiascos we have discussed, such as our “Still Accounting Challenged” and “First 10-K.”
Zynga is back in the news with disappointing results. The Company’s second quarter results were announced on July 25 with a loss and slowing revenue growth. Several law firms responded in our great American tradition by announcing class-action suits.
Groupon has suffered through several financial restatements, revisions of its revenues, SEC criticism of its non-GAAP performance metrics, internal control weaknesses over financial reporting, and public critiques of its reported operating cash flows. One would have thought that Groupon might have learned its lesson about the importance of accounting quality and financial reporting transparency. But [...]
J. EDWARD KETZ is an associate professor of accounting in the Smeal College of Business at Pennsylvania State University. He has a bachelor’s degree in political science, a master’s degree in accountancy, and a Ph.D., all from Virginia Tech. Professor Ketz has been a member of the Penn State faculty since 1981. He also has taught at the University of Connecticut and the University of Maryland. Professor Ketz has authored and edited 17 books including Hidden Financial Risk (Wiley, 2003) which examines the corporate culture and the institutional setting that engendered recent accounting scandals. Dr. Ketz has been cited in the popular and business press, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Business Week, and USA Today. He also has appeared as an accounting commentator on CNN, National Public Radio, and Bloomberg Radio.