The Ontario Securities Commission has launched a probe of Research In Motion’s stock option practices. An OSC spokesperson said the review was launched in early October, which is not long after the company announced it would have to restate past finan­cials because of its options accounting. Another tech company is having diffi­culties with their options […]

More →

FASB is coming out with some tough new standards relating to defined benefit pensions that is expected to result in signif­icant new liabil­ities (or increases to existing ones) for companies that had been accounting for their pensions under the more lax require­ments of the old standard. Defined benefit pension plans are definitely the more complicated […]

More →

Tech companies are the primary focus of the SEC’s recently announced and currently ongoing inves­ti­gation into options dating irreg­u­lar­ities, which makes sense given their proclivity for awarding stock options as part of compen­sation packages with employees. An article in BusinessWeek documents what tech company execu­tives have recently termed a “witch hunt”: Many execu­tives are surprised […]

More →

Brocade Commu­ni­ca­tions Systems has become the first company to be formally inves­ti­gated by the SEC regarding the recent options backdating issue. According to the SEC’s complaint document, which names three former execu­tives of the company as plain­tiffs, from 2000 through 2004 the company inflated net income by under­stating their options-related expense through fraud­ulent schemes to […]

More →

Enron burst into flames around January 2002. I was just starting my second semester at Brock University in the esteemed Bachelor of Accounting program when the Houston-based company went down. What did this mean to a 19-year-old Canadian accounting student with no share holdings and no knowledge of the energy trading giant from Texas? Actually, a […]

More →