Word: cfo
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...asked a court officer if it was for the Kozlowski case. As a writer-reporter for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, I wondered whether Atlanta Falcons tight end Brian Kozlowski had got into a legal scrape. Of course, the defendants were actually Dennis Kozlowski, the CEO of Tyco International, and ex-CFO Mark Swartz. Through a series of ever larger acquisitions throughout the '90s, the two built Tyco into a $36 billion conglomerate and made themselves exceedingly wealthy in the process...
...just a tad off--$74.4 billion less than it had said, after writedowns and adjustments. Outside auditors have signed off on bogus earnings reports and balance sheets at companies from Rite Aid to Xerox. In some cases, auditors dealt with corporate brass intent on concealing thievery; WorldCom's ex-CFO, Scott Sullivan, recently pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy charges, for instance. In other cases, auditors simply lacked spine: again and again, they failed to police the books aggressively for fear of losing the client, along with consulting gigs that brought in higher profits than standard audit work...
...billion. Grant Thornton booked a 21% increase, to $485 million. The other winners? Smaller shops, which are absorbing business that the big audit firms are barred from providing, such as running tests of internal controls for clients. "The environment for these services is phenomenally good," says Stephen Giusto, CFO of Resources Connection, an accountancy and consulting company based in Costa Mesa, Calif., whose fiscal 2003 revenues rose 11%, to $202 million...
...companies complain that the get-tough accounting regimen is draining resources. Paul Schmidt, controller for General Motors, says GM's audit committee meets "six to seven times face to face and four to five times by teleconference" annually. The "bigger drain," says Schmidt, is that GM's chairman and CFO are spending more time on accounting and certification issues, "instead of on strategy...
After spending nearly 15 years in the drug and auto-parts industries, Winston, 42, just landed her first CFO job--in kids' books. She takes over the finances of Scholastic, the world's largest publisher and distributor of children's titles (2003 sales: nearly $2 billion; Harry Potter had something to do with that). "No question, this industry is totally different," Winston says. "But at the high levels of finance, the fundamentals are the same...