Category: CFOs

The Latest CFO Headache: The United Nations

This story is republished from CFOZone, where you’ll find news, analysis and professional networking tools for finance executives.

CFOs face scrutiny from a wide range of sources: financial analysts, regulators, lawyers and accountants. A new body can now be added to this list, a body which is likely to cause some consternation. The U.N. last week formally castigated 86 global companies for failing to live up to the reporting requirements they agreed to when the companies became signatories of the UN Global Compact.


The scolding was undertaken by a coalition of global investors that are signatories to the U.N.’s Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), an organization created in 2006 that uses investors to try and force companies to adhere to a global set of corporate and social obligations. That coalition of investors manages assets of over $20 trillion, so they carry some weight.

The companies involved in the exercise include some well known names such as Visteon and Lionbridge Technologies from the U.S., Spice PLC from the U.K. and Orascom Construction Industries from Egypt. Specifically the report says the companies involved had not submitted a mandatory report on how they put the U.N. PRI initiative into action.

The report also praises companies that underwent a similar rebuke in 2009 but then submitted their reports. These companies included Bayer from Germany, Nikon from Japan and Inditex from Spain.

What the U.N. expects — and what many CFOs will find hard to achieve — is that companies need to play a large role in solving global issues such as climate change and poverty. As Gavin Power, Director of the U.N. Global Compact says: “The most critical challenges of our time…require a collective response involving investors, the corporate sector and all societal actors.” From that reading it seems that companies now have to bring about world peace and end hunger on top of delivering quarterly earnings. Many CFOs will think that is perhaps a responsibility too far.

Regulators’ Exposure of Accounting Loophole Helped Banks Hide Risk

This story is republished from CFOZone, where you’ll find news, analysis and professional networking tools for finance executives.

Not exactly shocking news but one of the mysteries of the financial crisis is how it came to be that banks ended up with rtransferred to investors.

Sure, it’s well known that the assets banks removed from their balance sheets did not shift much risk to investors after all, thanks to liquidity guarantees they supplied to investors. But that even took former Citigroup vice chairman and Treasury secretary Robert Rubin by surprise, as Rubin said he didn’t know such guarantees existed until after the bank was forced to increase its capital reserves because it had to make good on them.

Now research that came out a year ago but was revised late last month helps clarify what went awry.


It turns out that a conflict between the Financial Accounting Standards Board and federal bank regulators was even more critical than I thought it was when I reported it in 2004. The conflict arose after FASB voted to require commercial banks to consolidate such vehicles after such financing arrangements caused energy trading firm Enron Corp. to fail.

I was aware that the regulators asked the FASB to delay the new accounting rule and that the board eventually provided an exemption for so-called “qualified” special purpose entities, which provided a loophole from consolidation so long as they vehicles weren’t actively managed.

But the full significance of that escaped me until I saw the research, which shows that securitization along the lines of Enron’s — guarantees that limited or even eliminated investor risk — exploded after bank regulators codified the exemption in their capital requirements. Indeed, the exemption essentially paved the way for banks to use more off-balance-sheet financing vehicles that masked their true risk.

How exactly? In late 2004, the Federal Reserve Board, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of Thrift Supervision decided that asset-backed commercial paper put into special purpose vehicles known as conduits would not have to be consolidated for purposes of calculating capital requirements. And the regulators decided that banks need only reserve against 10 percent of the amounts put into conduits even when they guaranteed that investors would be repaid if there were a run on the conduits. Previously, securitizations typically put investors on the hook for that risk.

The research, originally published in May 2009 but revised in late January and entitled “Securitization without Risk Transfer,” found that the amount of subprime assets securitized through such vehicles soared in the wake of the exemption, even though the liquidity guarantees extended to investors meant that little or no risk had been transferred to them.

“Regulation should either treat off-balance-sheet activities with recourse as on-balance sheet for capital requirement and accounting disclosure purposes, or, require that off-balance sheet activities do not have recourse to bank balance sheets,” the authors, Viral V. Acharya and Philipp Schnabl of New York University and Gustavo Suarez of the Federal Reserve, conclude. “The current treatment appears to be a recipe for disaster, from the standpoint of transparency as well as capital adequacy of the financial intermediation sector as a whole.”

New Hartford CFO Is Latest to Flee from AIG

This story is republished from CFOZone, where you’ll find news, analysis and professional networking tools for finance executives.

Perhaps he wasn’t crazy about the new forced ranking method on pay?

The Hartford Financial Services Group announced late on Tuesday that Christopher Swift will join the insurer as chief financial officer effective March 1.

Swift, 49, is jumping ship from American Life Insurance Company (ALICO) where he was CFO. ALICO is a subsidiary of American International Group, which the bailed-out insurer is trying to sell to MetLife for $15 billion. The deal is currently hung up on a tax issue.

Hartford, which received $3.4 billion in government aid, has been undergoing a major executive shakeup.


Liam McGee, a former head of consumer banking at Bank of America, took over as chief executive in October from Ramani Ayer, who had led Hartford’s aggressive push into variable annuities and retired at the end of 2009.

Shortly after taking over, McGee tapped Hartford’s current CFO, Lizabeth Zlatkus, for its chief risk officer position. She’ll move into that role when Swift officially joins the company.

AIG, for its part, has been bleeding talent. More than 60 managers have left the company since it was bailed out in September 2008, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Pay practices at AIG have been under intense scrutiny by the public, as well as the government.

Swift began his career as an auditor in the Chicago office of KPMG where he focused on financial services. He was made partner at 32. He then became executive vice president of Conning Asset Management, a subsidiary of General American, where he was responsible for finance, sales/marketing and information technology. After MetLife acquired Conning in 1999, Swift returned to KPMG and was eventually appointed head of the firm’s Global Insurance Industry Practice. As leader of this segment, he worked with clients in both the life and P&C segments, globally and domestically. He was responsible for matters ranging from strategic and regulatory to audit, risk, advisory and tax services.

Does Andrew Hall Have a Little Andy Fastow in Him?

This story is republished from CFOZone, where you’ll find news, analysis and professional networking tools for finance executives.

They already share a first name.

Other than that, they probably don’t have much in common but does anybody else have a problem with the fact that the head of the energy trading unit that Citigroup sold to Occidental last year is setting up a hedge fund?

It would be an entirely different situation if Andrew Hall were leaving Occidental to do this, but he isn’t. Instead, he will wear both hats simultaneously.

That sure sounds like a clear conflict of interest to us. After all, fee structure of a hedge fund clearly incentivizes Hall to favor its investors over Occidental’s, though the oil company has a 20 percent equity stake in the fund.


The FT doesn’t explore this issue for some reason, referring merely to the fact that the two companies will be run “separately” and that the trades will be done “in parallel,” whatever that means.

And the article’s point about this deal having an air of history about it seems woefully misplaced.

Forget the fact that Hall’s hedge fund, Astenbeck, is named after a village near the historic German castle he owns. The more telling historical reference has to do with the conflict of interest. Indeed, the last time we saw a conflict this clear-cut was when Andrew Fastow ran some of Enron’s key off-balance-sheet partnerships while serving simultaneously as its CFO.

It was the disclosure of that particular factoid in a footnote that helped prompt short seller James Chanos to question Enron’s financial results back in early 2001.

And maybe this is just a coincidence, but Enron was an energy trading company as well. Remember Get Shorty?

As a side note, my colleague Matt Quinn wonders if Hall’s hedge fund will attract a lot of Citigroup’s former fund investors, and even draw Citigroup itself as an investor. That would certainly make sense if the bank is forced to get out of proprietary trading, as the Obama administration is proposing. Plus the bank would get to benefit from trading without having to reflect the risk on its balance sheet.

But the big question is, would Citi and its investors be treated better than Occidental’s shareholders?

KPMG Survey: Cost Cuts May Not Be Sustainable

This story is republished from CFOZone, where you’ll find news, analysis and professional networking tools for finance executives.

Corporate executives have really gotten to show off their cost-cutting skills during the financial downturn and the ongoing, tepid recovery, as many have managed to push earnings up even as revenues sagged.

But, in looking forward, they have to wonder what cost those reduced expenses came at.

According to a survey released by KPMG on Wednesday, board members and senior executives are doing just that. Forty-five percent of the respondents expressed concern about the sustainability of the cost reductions undertaken by their companies in response to the economic crisis.


“Significant cost cutting can create a variety of risks to the business, both near- and long-term,” said Mary Pat McCarthy, KPMG Vice Chair and Executive Director of the Audit Committee Institute, in a press release.

In particular, two-thirds of those surveyed said they were most concerned about the impact of cost cutting on their company’s employee talent and training. Other concerns include the impact of cost-reductions on internal controls (36 percent), fraud risk (25 percent), management of outsourcing and supply chain (24 percent), financial reporting integrity (21 percent), and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and compliance issues (9 percent).

Some 13 percent of the respondents said their companies had not implemented significant cost reductions.

While previous recessions were characterized by short-term belt-tightening and a quick return to normal, KPMG noted that current cost reductions may be much longer-term, and possibly permanent.

The long-term nature of the cuts is understandable in light of the executives’ economic outlook. The survey found that 45 percent of respondents don’t expect the U.S. economy to reach pre-crisis growth in terms of investment, employment and productivity before at least 2013, and 22 percent said it would be beyond 2014.

Another 17 percent were particularly pessimistic, saying the economy would not see pre-crisis growth “for the foreseeable future,” while 15 percent said recovery could come in 2011. Just 1 percent said recovery could occur in 2010.

Similarly, in a separate response, 66 percent said American companies will not return to “business as usual” and will operate in this new environment through at least 2013.

Three Challenges for the New Twitter CFO

The micro-blogging phenom Twitter has faced a lot of doubts about its business plan as its popularity has exploded. The speed that the Company has seen and thus, the demand for monetization, led to the Company announcing the hiring of Ali Rowghani, currently CFO at Pixar, as the Twitter’s first financial chief.

The Company raised $100 million back in September and entered into licensing agreements with both Microsoft and Google to feed real time information into their search engines.

This all sounds good but Mr. Rowghani still has his work cut out for him. Here are three challenges he will face as the first CFO of Twitter:


Help Develop a Sustainable Business Model – So you’ve got this great idea, micro-blogging at 140 characters a pop. Now what? Sure you’ve struck deals with Microsoft and Google but are is there anything else cooking? How do you monetize how professionals use Twitter that doesn’t involve what you just ordered for lunch? Plus, how do address stats like these:

– 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009.

– 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day

- 21% of users have never posted a Tweet

– 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people.

– 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity

Control Expenses – Any startup company has to run a tight ship, regardless of their popularity and Twitter is no exception. The company is hiring engineers and other professionals that won’t come cheap (unless they pay them in equity, more on that later) and their headquarters is located in downtown San Francisco where rent doesn’t come cheap. That $100 million will burn up awfully fast if they don’t develop solid revenue streams and don’t keep costs down.

Build a strong infrastructure for the finance and accounting functions – Ultimately the CFO is responsible for the finance and accounting departments for a company. We’ll go out on a limb and say that the founders of Twitter know squat about setting up either, despite their importance within the organization.

Mr. Rowghani will have to get these functions in tip-top, especially if the pressure to take the company public proves too much to bear. Even if the Company manages to resist this route — like Facebook has so far — they still need reliable financial reporting, especially if they decided to do some less than vanilla transactions like equity comp. Additionally, they need people that will be able to lay out good financing options for the development of the Company. Whether that means borrowing money (not the best idea for a startup) or raising it through new investors (private or public) it will take airtight planning and the CFO will oversee all of it.

For the new CFO to succeed he will have address these issues and more as he balances the pressure of a weak economy and cautious investors concerned with guarding their capital.

(UPDATE) Ex-Hospital CFO Pleads Guilty to Tax Evasion, Health Care Fraud

In dubious CFO news, Vincent Rubio, the former financial chief at Tustin Hospital and Medical Center, agreed to plead guilty yesterday for paying kickbacks to “marketers” who recruited homeless people from the Skid Row area of Los Angeles.

Rubio pleaded guilty to health care fraud and tax evasion; he was the fifth person to charged in the investigation that is still ongoing. He faces fifteen years in prison After the homeless people were treated, the hospital billed Medicare and Medi-Cal for unnecessary treatments.


The AP piece doesn’t have much to it so we’re got to wondering all sorts of things like: A) Who discovered this fraud? Was it — gasp — the auditors? B) what were these unnecessary treatments? We’re these displaced individuals getting checked for hernias or less intrusive procedures? C) how much was Medicare and Medi-Cal charged? Are we talking Madoff-esque numbers? D) When the homeless were finished up at the hospital did they strap them to a rickshaw and send them back out in the streets or did they try to help them for real?

We called the hospital to find out more and we were connected to a spokesperson, who told us that she could not comment on the matter. She informed us that our message would be relayed to the hospital’s President, James Young. At the time of posting, we had not heard back from him. We’ll update this post with any comment or further information.

Ex-hospital CFO pleads guilty in homeless scam [AP via SF Chronicle]

UPDATE Friday, February 12th: We received the press release from Pacific Health, the owner of the Hospital:

February 11, 2010

Press Release

Pacific Health Corporation learned of the allegation that a third party made improper payments to Vince Rubio on November 30, 2006. Upon receipt of the allegation, Pacific Health Corporation contacted its outside counsel to investigate the allegation.

Within one day of the allegation being received, Pacific Health Corporation took employment action in the matter, placing Mr. Rubio on leave. Within one week, Pacific Health Corporation terminated the employment of Mr. Rubio.

After the completion of the its internal review and taking the employment action, Pacific Health reported the matter to law enforcement officials. That took place in early 2007.

Ex-Bank of America CFO Is in Cuomo’s Crosshairs

This story is republished from CFOZone, where you’ll find news, analysis and professional networking tools for finance executives.

We briefly discussed work-inspired nightmares yesterday but as professionarobably don’t get a whole lot more unsettling than Joe L. Price’s.

Price, the former CFO at Bank of America, must be tossing and turning lately, what with the attorney general of New York naming him personally last week in a lawsuit over the bank’s handling of the ugly Merrill Lynch acquisition/investor-subsidized bailout/compensation party in late 2008.


Now, Price and former BofA CEO Ken Lewis face another unpleasant twist in what they must’ve thought originally was a slam dunk in an awkward but palatable settlement with the SEC over the Merrill Lynch deal (beware that slam-dunk feeling [see Tenet, George]).

Recall how Jed Rakoff, the irascible U.S. District Court judge presiding over the BofA/Merrill Lynch case, last year rejected a settlement between the SEC and BofA, saying that $33 million wasn’t nearly enough for the bank to make things right with investors who were kept in the dark about the unsavory downside – if that’s not too generous a word – for taking on Merrill Lynch’s baggage. And then on Monday Rakoff started asking mean questions about the second rendition, in which the SEC and BofA are saying, okay, fine, how does $150 million sound?

Going by some of the doubts Rakoff raised, he isn’t leaning toward letting the BofA executives ease on out of their difficult litigation-riddled winter into a springtime of sun-dappled redemption and new life. Easter, as it were, may yet be cold and wet (as may Passover, choose your festival). But don’t blame Rakoff because there are better scapegoats – the SEC, Andrew Cuomo, Punxatawny Phil …

Cuomo, that pesky AG in Albany, asserted in his allegations against Price et al. that BofA lawyers who had counseled against pulling the curtain aside on certain details about Merrill Lynch were essentially operating in the dark and that they were, therefore, misled. “Bank management failed to provide any of their lawyers with accurate information about the losses which the disclosure issue concerned,” the civil-suit complaint says, adding painful elaboration that alleges “false and incomplete information provided by Price.” (Ron Fink explains here).

This is not the kind of thing a CFO likes to read about himself or herself, which is why it may be best as a rule to come clean from the get-go. At the heart of the controversy is the assertion that BofA execs were simply not forthright about how they allowed Merrill Lynch brass to receive billions of dollars in bonus bucks in exchange for having lost billions of investor dollars.

In such a context, Radoff has implied, $33 million is chicken feed and $150 million is – I don’t know – cat food? The good judge apparently wants the bankers to throw some steak over the wall.

Also at issue, and fundamental to how BofA is managed going forward, are questions about how certain aspects of corporate governance are handled, perhaps especially about how compensation is set. Rakoff suggested that there might be better ways to come up with a reasonable pay scheme than leaving it to BofA’s compensation committee to pick its compensation consultant of choice.

A big clue about how he might rule on this is in his observation on Monday as to the “incredibly bloated compensation of too many executives in too many American companies.”

Broadway Production of Enron Has Its CFO

As we anticipate the greatest thing to happen to Broadway since George Bush’s penis, we now know who will play the most important role of the entire production: numbers magician Andy Fastow.

The honor goes to Stephen Kunken, best know for his role as James Reston in Frost/Nixon. He will be alongside Norbert Leo Butz who will be playing Jeff Skilling.

We located the list of the cast for the London production of Enron and there is a role for “Arthur Andersen” and two for “Lehman Brothers” so these key roles still need to be filled.

Back to the future Tony winner; we don’t envy the research that Kunken has ahead of him since we’re assuming that he’ll have to channel the book cooking prowess of AF. Then again, since he’s an actor, he only has to pretend to know what he’s talking about with regard to accounting and financial reporting; there’s accountants out there doing that every day.

Kunken Will Play Enron CFO on Broadway [Playbill]

(UPDATE) Was Deloitte’s Warning to Merrill Lynch Lacking Urgency?

– Updated to included statement from Deloitte

By now you’ve heard that Ken Lewis and former BofA CFO Joe Price are in a bit of pickle, thanks to NYAG Andy Cuomo.

Long/short is that Drew has filed civil charges claiming that these two ignored advice to disclose information about the losses at Merrill Lynch and went ahead with their plans that ended up screwing just about everyone in the entire world.


According to the complaint, Deloitte was right in the middle of the action back in December of ’08 as the auditor of ML and from the sounds of it, they kinda-sorta encouraged ML’s counsel to disclose the losses saying:

given the losses through what it looks like will be November when it closes, given the fact that you have another couple of billion of dollars coming down the road in goodwill impairment, we believe it’s prudent that you might want to consider filing an 8K to let the shareholders, who are voting on this transaction, know about the size of the losses to date

Okay, so “prudent that you might want to consider” sounds like a “you can disclose the losses if you want to but we’re not making a BFD out of this” but Andy’s complaint sure presents it as a legit warning. We’re not saying that Thomas Graham, the Deloitte partner on Merrill, needed to be hyperventilating while telling ML’s Chief Accounting Officer David Moser that they “might want to consider” the disclosure but Moser was worried enough to tell in-house counsel about it.

Maybe Moser didn’t bring it up because he knew that lawyers don’t take anything auditors say too seriously. If everyone who claims to be worried, was legitimately concerned, perhaps they should’ve considered some double exclamation point usage. Oh well; next time!

We haven’t seen a statement from Deloitte anywhere and they haven’t gotten back to us at this time. Deloitte provided us with the following statement:

Deloitte personnel have testified as part of the New York attorney general’s investigation. Some of that testimony is cited publicly in the attorney general’s complaint. Deloitte is not a party to this proceeding, and due to professional standards, we cannot comment further on confidential client matters.

At the end of the day, BofA’s own general counsel tried to tell KL what’s what and he ultimately got fired so Deloitte ends up being a small fish in this whole situation (i.e. “not a party to proceeding”). Cuomo wants to be governor for crying out loud. Voters don’t give a shit if you file civil complaints against auditors.

NYAG_Complaint