Exxon Mobil announced recently the highest annual profits by a US corpo­ration in history. Reaction was predictable — the US Congress was littered with outraged politi­cians calling for a windfall profits tax. But that would be wrong, and the Tax Foundation can explain why much better than I: While they were recording record profits last year, […]

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Wikipedia is a good source of infor­mation about a variety of topics. I’m pleased to find that it’s generally pretty good about accounting too. The article on the Balance Sheet contains “case studies” showing the effect of some trans­ac­tions on a very basic balance sheet. As well, I’d never seen non-current liabil­ities referred to as […]

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Nortel released their 2005 finan­cials Friday and completed more restate­ments of prior years’ results. The restate­ments related to revenue recog­nition and decreased revenues and net income because the revenue should’ve been booked in different periods. Maybe this will mark a turning point for the Canadian commu­ni­ca­tions equipment company and they can retain (or regain) their […]

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Om Malik, writer at Business 2.0 and power blogger, has posted his thoughts on the Nortel announcement from a couple days ago that they would have to restate their earnings again. His reaction is one of incredulity that Nortel, “a big NYSE company,” could actually not be able to get their accounting straightened out after […]

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Nortel Networks Corp. once again will have to restate its financial results to fix accounting mistakes, the company said on Friday as it posted a fourth-quarter loss of $2.2 billion. Their chief executive maintains that the revenue was just recog­nized in incorrect periods, from 2002 through 2005. Revenue recog­nition is definitely a touchy subject these […]

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