A few articles for your growth. Comp and Review reports under SSARS 21 and 19. Bake-your-own net income measures. Lunch money thief gets 5 years in prison and $1.8M restitution
1/7 – CPA-Scribo – SSARS 21 Reports – Preparation, Compilation, and Review – Charles Hall has a great post providing sample reports under SSARS 21. Gives the reports under SSARS 19 for contrast. You gotta’ check it out.
Even better news – he is in process of writing a book on SSARS 21. Expect to see it this spring. I’ll be keeping my eyes open for it.
1/8 – Wall Street Journal – Tailored Accounting at IPOs Raises Flags – A lot of companies, especially IPOs, have developed a non-GAAP alternative to measure their performance. Usually the starting point in EBITDA, but often non-recurring or some other costs are also excluded from the P&L. Results mentioned in the article turn large losses into attractive gains.
How widespread is it? From the article:
According to Audit Analytics data, 59% of the companies that filed for an IPO since 2012 have used nonstandard metrics, compared with 48% in 2010 and 2011.
This is a good overview for a lot of other articles I’ve seen in recent months.
1/8 – Daily Bulletin – Rialto Unified: Lunch money embezzler Judith Oakes gets 5 year in jail – School district accountant Judith Oakes was sentenced to five years in prison and order to pay $1.85M restitution for stealing $1.8M of school lunch money over eight years. She pled guilty last month. The DA believes she stole about $3M but can only prove the $1.8M, primarily because the statute of limitations ran out on some of the older incidents.
Interesting tidbit in the article is she was caught on video surveillance on two occasions. The cameras had not been working for years and were repaired apparently with her not knowing of the repairs.