The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

05/19/06 - 07:18 AM EDT

VZ (Action Alerts PLUS PICK) BLS T Q BOL THC VTSS GM

Colin Barr

5. Outcome Statement

General Motors (GM - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) had the bean counters jumping this week.

Still smarting from last year's $10.6 billion annual loss, the automaker set plans Wednesday to restructure its finance ranks.

Controller Paul Schmidt will retire later this year, and chief accounting officer Peter Bible will resign June 1 to pursue other career options. GM, which plans to combine the positions of controller and chief accounting officer, began a search for external candidates.

GM also hired turnaround firm AlixPartners to tighten its controls and generally shape up its bookkeeping.

"One of our key objectives in finance is to minimize risk," said finance chief Fritz Henderson. "To that end, we are moving quickly to make sure that we have a robust level of internal controls and systems in place -- and AlixPartners has tremendous expertise to support this initiative."

GM and Alix seem like a good fit. GM has been hit over the past year by a series of accounting missteps, including revisions to its quarterly results and a restatement dating back several years. The company disclosed last fall that its accounting methods were under investigation by federal regulators.

And AlixPartners' slogan, as noted on its Web site, is "Change the outcome."

Unfortunately, weighed down by flagging sales and hefty overhead, GM has a much taller task: It needs to change the income.

Dumb-o-Meter score: 75. Actually, GM recently did just that for its first quarter, when a late change in its accounting for a retiree health care settlement turned a $323 million loss into a $445 million profit.