Please ensure Javascript is enabled for purposes of website accessibility

Accounting News Roundup: Computation Errors and Grant Thornton’s New Global CEO | 05.16.17

accounting-news-Dicks-Sporting-Goods-mistakes

Oops

This is from last week but seems worth sharing. Dick’s Sporting Goods announced in a SEC filing that it made a $23 million “computation error” that overstated its “adjusted earnings” and that’s mildly embarrassing:

The company discovered it had inadvertently included its asset impairment charges in two places, in effect double-counting the costs, said Lee Belitsky, chief financial officer for Dick’s Sporting Goods.Mr. Belitsky emphasized that those calculations occurred outside of the company’s official earnings reported using generally accepted accounting principles, known as GAAP.

“It’s a correction of a supplemental reporting table,” Mr. Belitsky said in an interview.

“Since it was incorrect and it had been provided to investors, we figured we would correct that,” Belitsky also said. I wonder how many people looked at that table before they sent it out. I wonder if anyone feels the need to apologize. In the end, it’s just a mistake, but it’s still a $23 million mistake, which may have affected someone’s decision about investing in a monster sporting goods store, but probably didn’t.

CEOs

Grant Thornton announced that Peter Bodin will be its new global CEO, succeeding Ed Nusbaum on January 1, 2018. Bodin led GT Sweden for 16 years and also served as the Chairman of the Board of the global firm for five years.

Criminal masterminds

Remember way back in 2012, when everyone was demanding that then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney was demanding he release his tax returns? Oh, man, those were good times. If you recall, at one point, someone claimed to have stolen Romney’s returns from a PwC office in Tennessee and held them for a 1 million Bitcoin ransom. That turned out to be a hoax, of course, and clues that included pictures of cats led investigators to a man who was eventually convicted of various extortion-related crimes.

Well, that guy, Michael Mancil Brown aka Dr. Evil, has successfully appealed his four-year prison sentence. A report from The Register explains that a panel of judges agreed that the possibility that someone else may have used Brown’s computer was enough to “vacate the sentence.” Of course, the best stuff was the comical details of how he was caught:

All three flash drives contained a file named “Romney1040-Collection.7z.” … The unallocated space on the drives also held text strings and two photos of cats. The PricewaterhouseCoopers flash drive held the text string, “5276 dolphin kathryn.” … The Democratic Party drive had the string “4154 dolphin KnightMB.”

A series of Google searches using “KnightMB” revealed an email address, [email protected], and that a 33 year-old Tennessean named Michael Brown made online posts connected to that address.

“Dr. Evil” had used that email address for his AT&T account, his wife’s name is Kathryn, and he’d posted videos on YouTube as KnightMB.

Obviously the moral here is: Mitt Romney shouldn’t have released his tax returns.

Previously, on Going Concern…

Marsha Leest wrote about how to make a job search plan. In Open Items, someone’s asking about pricing for a startup CPA firm.

In other news:

Get the Accounting News Roundup in your inbox every weekday by signing up here.

Latest Accounting Jobs--Apply Now:

Have something to add to this story? Give us a shout by email, Twitter, or text/call the tipline at 202-505-8885. As always, all tips are anonymous.

Related articles

netflix parasite meme

Netflix Picks an EY Alum For Its Next Chief Accounting Officer, Replacing the Last Guy Who Dipped After Three Months

I was going to make some kind of Sense8 “canceled before its time” joke about Netflix’s last CAO leaving after just three months alas nothing came to me which is probably for the best because it would have been a stupid joke anyway. Deadline reports that Netflix has found a new CAO, hopefully this one […]

Industry Accounting Salary Outlook for 2023 is Not Horrible

Unless you have the word “chief” in your job title, accounting salaries in industry for 2023 are projected to be higher than in 2022—including 11 roles that are expected to have double-digit increases, according to our analysis of the 2022 and 2023 Accounting & Finance Salary Guides from LHH Recruitment Solutions (formerly Accounting Principals). Of […]