The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main as well.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Timothy Sipples) writes: > The quarterly financial results for any publicly traded company, including > IBM, get reported to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the > Internal Revenue Service (for tax purposes), and are scrutinized by > independent auditors. There's a whole legal and regulatory framework for > how this stuff gets reported, accurately. Revenue gets counted and counted > well. And since IBM (and others) have a really good estimate of total > server revenue in the global market, yes, the CFO can (and did) make that > kind of "global statement." that is how it is suppose to work. After worldcom/enron ... GAO started a study of such reporting and looking at statistics of "refillings" ... i.e. were subsequently reporting is refiled because of (at least) audit and accounting errors. previously supposedly something like three percent of companies had audit and accounting errors in their filed reports ... starting around enron/worldcom it was approaching ten percent and has slightly increased since then (even after legislation like sox). last time i checked there was GAO report regarding their "database" of SEC filings up through 2006. there have been some articles relating it to general decline of veracity in society ... things like mistatements on resumes, fudged numbers in SEC filings, triple-A ratings for *toxic CDOs* (which were subsequently downrated), etc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
