"Accounting irregularities" at MS

Post #28,213 by Silverlock 2/13/02 9:19:32 AM Reply	"Accounting irregularities" at MS Big difference from the Enron style of hiding debt. MS apparantly was hiding profit from good quarters to pad earnings in bad quarters. The US Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into Microsoft thinks the company may have been holding back cash in order to manipulate future earnings, according to the Wall Street Journal. Astute CFOs who do such things essentially 'hide' money from good quarters in order to pad out the more sluggish ones, thus allowing their company to 'beat the Street' with monotonous regularity, to the unbounded joy of shareholders, Street and analysts alike. Yet another [link\|http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/24046.html\|Register] piece. With this much manure around, there must be a pony somewhere.
Post #28,219 by CRConrad 2/13/02 10:02:07 AM Reply	This was mentioned in InfoWorld back in ~1998, IIRC... ...and besides that, there's Bill Parrish's old [link\|http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html\|Microsoft financial fraud page], which has also been around for at least as long. (Heck, it hasn't been updated since November -99!) So, what can I say -- except: Good fucking morning, SEC... WHAT THE HELL TOOK YOU SO LONG?!? Christian R. Conrad Of course, who am I to point fingers? I'm in the "Information Technology" business, prima facia evidence that there's bats in the bell tower. -- [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=27764\|Andrew Grygus]
Post #28,222 by tonytib 2/13/02 10:10:15 AM Reply	Plus, there's the fact they're sitting on $36B in cash and not paying dividends. Supposedly there's a law about that, too (keeping more cash than is reasonably needed). Scott Herhold of the SJ Merc wrote an article on the lack of MS dividends recently. You know, what I'd like to see is real enforcement of existing laws (e.g. anti-trust, not keeping more cash than reasonably necessary, fraud (e.g. Enron, investment bankers (who did get fined $100 million), and so on) than to hear the Congress critters pontificate about Enron and pass some more laws that don't help at all -- especially if they're not enforced. And why in the world does the investigation take 2.5 years? Tony

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