Word: sec
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...officers gave themselves rich rewards. The bosses enjoyed their bounty until earlier this year, when the Securities and Exchange Commission ordered the bonuses paid back. President Leon C. Hirsch, for one, agreed to relinquish $317,000. A probe of U.S. Surgical's books, the SEC claimed, had discovered that the company padded its 1979-81 profits by more than $18 million...
Rooting out financial-disclosure fraud has become the top priority of SEC Chairman John Shad this year. The federal agency is coming down hard on companies that sugar-coat their earnings reports to give stockholders an artificially sweetened idea of corporate performance. Says Shad: "Some companies try to hide the bad news." So far this year the SEC has brought lawsuits against 25 firms for cooking the books, compared with 23 in all of 1983. This month the SEC is also expected to impose stricter guidelines for financial disclosure. Under the new rules, companies would be required to publish separate...
...most stunning case of SEC enforcement occurred last month when the agency ordered California's Financial Corp. of America to restate its second-quarter results to show a $107.5 million loss instead of a $31.1 million profit. After customers realized the true state of the savings-and-loan company's finances, they began a temporary run on deposits. Disillusioned investors have driven the company's stock price down 17% since the announcement. During the same week the SEC charged Stauffer Chemical of Westport, Conn., with overstating its 1982 earnings by $31 million, allegedly by recording sales that...
...SEC has assigned one-third of its 600-member enforcement staff to the task of ferreting out creative accounting. This year they will investigate about 300 companies, relying on tip-offs from company employees, complaints from investors and painstaking scrutiny of documents...
Much of the apparent increase in book cooking is cyclical. The SEC is just now catching up with firms that tried to smooth out the bumps in their performance during the last recession by borrowing from future or past profits. Government officials say they also often find shady accounting in companies where top managers have set goals that are unrealistically high. Says L. Glenn Perry, former chief accountant for the SEC's enforcement division: "The two primary reasons for book cooking are ego and greed." Perry says that at now bankrupt A.M. International, the office-equipment firm, some employees...