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Why Yes, Cleaning Up an Enormous Accounting Fraud Is as Bad as You Might Imagine

Posted on by Caleb Newquist

Before she became CFO of AES (and now Gannett), Victoria Harker had the distinct pleasure of mopping the floor at WorldCom after the company imploded in 2002 and, yeah, it was pretty awful: 

What has been your worst day on the job?
The WorldCom meltdown was likely the worst day on the job. I knew only how little we knew then about the state of the company’s financials, and had a growing sense of the enormity of the task ahead to “right the ship”: a $71 billion restatement, and 15 million lines of accounting code to be re-written!

[via CFO] 

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Any Budding CFOs Who Had Dreams of Being an Astronaut Should Get Their Résumés in Order

Virgin Galactic is racing to be the first company to launch a commercial space flight and since these sort of things usually need someone that’s good with numbers, the company is CFO shopping:

Virgin Galactic, a leader in the race to launch commercial space flights, is looking to hire the first CFO in a brand-new industry sector. “It’s a historic thing,” says George Whitesides, the former NASA chief of staff who is the company’s chief executive. “The executives here are thinking back to the early days of aviation, when companies like American Airlines were getting started. For the right person, it would be tremendously exciting.”

Naturally, this particular job isn’t for just any ol’ finance and accounting sage. You need experience in aerospace, raising both private and public money, and a little exuberance might be nice:

The right person will have strong experience in raising funds from private-equity investors and public offerings, ideally some prior experience or relationship with the aerospace industry, and a hint of merriment.

Virgin Galactic wants a CFO who “fits the Virgin brand,” which means someone who is hard-working but also dynamic and able to integrate work and fun, à la company founder and committed thrill-seeker Richard Branson. Yes, this will not only be the first CFO in a new sector, but quite possibly the first one to rocket into space.

So for you buttoned-up types, just keep moving along. Virgin will be needing for someone who won’t be ashamed by wearing adult diapers and projectile vomiting in front of the billionaire boss.

Virgin Territory for One Lucky CFO [CFO]

Time Warner Cable CFO Pretty Frank About How Crappy Things Look

That, or Robert Marcus needs a little training in positive spin:

The environment for cable television subscribers is “very, very weak,” according to Time Warner Cable Inc. (TWC) Chief Financial Officer Robert Marcus, and the company may actually see the total number of subscribers to its television, Internet and telephone services shrink during the current quarter.

The statement, made Wednesday at a Bank of America Merrill Lynch conference in California, caused Time Warner Cable stock to lose as much as 5.3% in Wednesday afternoon trading immediately after Marcus delivered his opening remarks.

Marcus said August saw the “usual uptick in subscriber performance,” as children went back to college, but unemployment, high vacancy rates in housing and “really anemic new home formation” are “resulting in some pretty weak subscriber numbers.”

Time Warner Cable Stock Sinks After CFO’s Downbeat Remarks [Dow Jones]

There’s at Least One Interesting Theory Out There About the Wells Fargo CFO’s Sudden Resignation

Last week, we told you about Wells Fargo’s announcement that their CFO gave himself an early birthday gift by throwing a retirement party for himself. As previously mentioned, Howard Atkins’s departure was a little mysterio and no one had any theories (crackpot or otherwise) on the Atkins’s march in. That all changed yesterday when Christopher Whalen, an analyst at Institutional Risk Analytics issued a report that stated that he, for one, wasn’t buying the “personal issues” story put out by the bank:

“The departure of Atkins, we are led to believe, was not merely the result of personal issues, but reflects an ongoing internal dispute within [Wells Fargo’s] executive suite regarding the bank’s disclosure,” he writes.

Whalen then goes on to argue that Wells Fargo’s “public behavior suggests significant problems in the bank’s internal systems and controls as defined by the Sarbanes-Oxley law. We further understand that some officials of [Wells Fargo], increasingly uncomfortable with the bank’s aggressive public disclosure regime, have reached out to regulators because of concerns regarding accounting issues.”

The Stagecoach Gang, for their part, is sticking to their story citing the “personal reasons” and their spokesman dismissed Whalen’s report with “pfffft” and a wave of the hand, saying, “I haven’t heard anything like that. It’s speculation. I’m not going to comment on it.”

Wells Fargo CFO Exit Tied to Disclosure: Analyst [The Street]