Rash of Restatements Rattles

Confession season is upon us, but the problem so far isn't companies owing up to earnings shortfalls. Instead, they're admitting past financial results were simply wrong.

Unnerved by a sterner accounting culture, companies have been increasingly reaching back years to ratchet down reported profits by tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Eyeing the March 15 filing deadline for calendar 2003 annual reports, Bristol-Myers Squibb(BMY), P.F. Chang's(PFCB), Veritas(VRTS) and Nortel(NT ) this week joined a fast-growing string of public companies to say prior financial reports inflated real business trends.

The number of restated audited annual financial statements hit a record high of 206 last year, according to Chicago-based Huron Consulting Group. Observers say 2004 is already shaping up as a banner year for revisions.

"There are certainly more high-profile restatements and you're hearing about them more" compared to past years, said Jeff Brotman, an accounting professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

For Bristol-Myers Squibb, Nortel and Network Associates (NET), recent restatements came on top of prior restatements, much to the irritation of investors. In at least two cases, the embarrassing double restatements prompted internal shifts; Nortel put two of its financial executives on leave as part of a bookkeeping probe. Network Associates fired PricewaterhouseCoopers, according to various news reports, after the auditor cited "material weakness" in its internal controls in the company's annual report.

Probably the biggest reason for the wave of honesty is a host of new corporate governance and accounting rules in the wake of the corporate reform legislation known as Sarbanes-Oxley, which went into effect a year and a half ago. Also, accounting firms have grown far more cautious, cowed by the collapse of auditor Arthur Andersen in 2002 after massive fraud at its client Enron.

The upshot is that both managers and auditors are now more likely to err on the side of conservative accounting.