Slashdot Mirror
CA's Ex-CEO Indicted on Fraud
An anonymous reader writes "CNN is carrying a story about how Sanjay Kumar, ex-CEO of Computer Associates, was indicted on fraud charges. Prosecutors said the long-running accounting fraud scheme featured what came to be known by Computer Associates employees as a "35-day month" because company books were routinely kept open until revenues exceeded projected goals. "The defendants cooked the books by simply keeping them open beyond the end of a fiscal quarter for however long it took to meet the analysts earning estimates," said Deputy Attorney General James Comey. Comey said by the time the "house of cards" collapsed, about $2.2 Billion in revenue was booked prematurely. Good thing CA settled it's case with the DOJ."
A late bubble bursting? A lot of innocent people are going to suffer for this: lost jobs, lost opportunity, lost credibility.
Seriously, can't the tech industry rise above this Enron-ish nonsense?
You seem to think that the IT industry has some eerie ethics that govern all. That is not the case. The IT industry is just another industry with shares, stockholders, filings, profits and losses. Money is what counts. The size of the profits and payouts of high ranking executives are just numbers on a scoresheet those people play like a game. Trouble is, real people get hurt and those assholes get a slap on the wrist at the white-collar country club jail for a while.
If you or I were to walk into a bank with a note that said "I have a gun." and walked away with a few $K, once caught we'd be in jail longer than the white collar criminals that steal tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
Trolling is a art,
which brings us back to the beginning of the argument... that if the focus was more on dividends and less on share value going up and up and up, the incentive to cook books would not be as large.
Making the share price go up only requires BELIEF that the stock is worth more... paying more dividends requires actual profits... I think that was the point.
Nobody is arguing that it's not an investment.. it is.. but the inherent value of that investment is, or should be, based on what the company can actually produce.. in reality, it's now based largely on hype.