Tuesday, September 1, 2009

"Fudge This"

The Big Picture reports that NZ Farming (NXZ) got into trouble with regulators for including a certain comment in their financial statements (HT FASRI):


In a response letter, the company clarifies that (emphasis added):
The comment was a personal file note included in an earlier working draft of the notes to the Financial Statements. The file note was made as a prompt to reconcile a minor rounding difference between the cash-flow reconciliation note 3 and the fixed assets note 11 in respect of depreciation expense for the period. Importantly the comment was not in the Financial Statements reviewed and approved by the Board of Directors of NZS or its auditors.
Whoops. I am sure that the auditors and board of directors love it when the company files a set of financial statements that is slightly different than the ones that were reviewed and approved by the board and the auditors... I guess the tie out can be more exciting than associates/interns might have guessed.

In any case, I think we should give them a blue ribbon for being transparent!

1 comment:

  1. That is classic! I wonder how many companies have a "fudge this" account...

    ReplyDelete