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As news continues to come out related to overstatement of the White House jobs report for jobs created or saved by stimulus money, Wall Street has taken that as a cue to restate their financials and now show an increase in earnings of 2,876% over original reports.
“The Administration gave us a very clear example of how reporting works in this new era of accountability,” said the CFO of a Fortune 100 company who wished to remain anonymous. “We initially showed a loss of around $150 million last quarter, but under the new reporting methodology we show a profit of $75 million. When the SEC questioned some of the obvious discrepancies, we told them that some of our subsidiaries were confused by the forms we sent for them to report their results. We are also no longer reporting revenue based on sales. The new methodology categorizes it as revenue ‘created or saved’. So even though our revenue under old standards might have dropped $300 million, we showed a positive increase because we took steps that ’saved’ $400 million in revenue that would otherwise have been lost. It’s really too complicated for the average person to understand.”
SEC officials were scrambling to determine how to deal with the new reporting standards being adopted by publicly traded companies in the wake of the new White House standard. Some companies were reporting revenues from offices that don’t even exist, which complies with the White House standard of reporting job creation in congressional districts that don’t exist. “We’re waiting for guidance from the Administration,” said one SEC official. “I’ve got a CFO who is claiming that the smallest subsidiary in her company reported revenues of $200 million on expenses of $1 million. Clearly it is not accurate. But she claims that’s what the subsidiary is reporting, and they don’t have the resources to verify every piece of data reported on these forms. I’ve go another guy claiming $100 million in revenues from their South Park, Colorado, division headed up by Eric Cartman. It’s really causing us a problem, and we are urgently in need of some guidance here.”