The more things change...
Quote of note:
This, of course, was all supposed to end when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in January 2003 issued rules that required more clarity in corporate earnings results. The new rules were a response to reporting abuses in the 1990s, especially among technology and telecommunications companies that ignored normal business costs as a way of padding their bottom lines.
Lifting the Lid: U.S. Companies Hide Bad News Deep in Releases
Sat Feb 26, 2005 07:30 AM ET
By Michael Flaherty
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Burying bad news is back with a vengeance.
Investors may have thought the days when companies hid massive net losses, focused on some kind of weird adjusted measure of earnings and talked mumbo jumbo about their prospects died out with the dot-com bust. But a glance through some of the reports coming through in the past week shows that just isn't the case.
Take Clear Channel Communications Inc., for example. You won't find any mention of its quarterly net loss of $4.67 billion until page 9 of the earnings statement. The company's quarterly results, reported on Friday, were hit with a $4.9 billion write-down -- and that wasn't deemed important enough to mention until page 7.
"The charge doesn't upset me, it's the fact that it was so hard to find," said analyst Peter Mirsky of Oppenheimer & Co. "It's disturbing that the company wouldn't be a bit more forward about it."
