Posted on 08/20/2019 12:17:38 PM PDT by ransomnote
A former Walt Disney Co. accountant says she has filed a series of whistleblower tips with the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging the company has materially overstated revenue for years.
Sandra Kuba, formerly a senior financial analyst in Disney’s DIS, +0.29% revenue-operations department who worked for the company for 18 years, alleges that employees working in the parks-and-resorts business segment systematically overstated revenue by billions of dollars by exploiting weaknesses in the company’s accounting software.
Kuba said she has met with officials from the SEC on several occasions to discuss the allegations.
A spokeswoman for the SEC declined to comment.
A Disney spokesperson said the company had reviewed the whistleblower’s claims and found that they were “utterly without merit.”
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(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
The wife and I took our great-niece to Disneyworld back in April.
With the kind of money we shelled out for food and merchandise, (IOW, everything was over-overpriced), I’m surprised that Accounting Department had to resort to account tricks to inflate revenue.
Gee, you wonder about something like this when a few years ago, they laid off a good number of their tech staff to replace them with foreign nationals that they could pay that good bit lower. All of that despite recording record profits.
True....but....not all whistle blowers are truth tellers
It does seem the SEC is looking...but still....
Just add the SEC to the list of corrupt Gubment agencies.
You can overstate income for a year or two but eventually it becomes obvious that the income generated doesn’t exist in any hard assets.
Did the spokesperson identify as a woman?
What if the company's business is illusions and make-believe?
How mickey Mouse!
The Disney family needs to come back and take control.
Wouldn’t the true finances be reflected in stock dividends, etc? By overstating incomes and profits, wouldn’t dividends, etc. have to correspond to the stated figures, or appear to be out of kilter? Somebody should have smelled a rat. What about audits? I’m inclined to not believe the Whistle Blower. Vendetta, anyone? Hmmmm?
It looks like she’s claiming that there were things like comped rooms and golf rounds, and discounted gift cards that were counted as full value. Okay, maybe. But then she claims that these added up to $6 billion in one year when the division reported earnings of $10 billion that year. You can hide a little around the edges, but you can’t hide 60% of the total.
Recessions uncover what auditors do not.
Ping.
Big deal. Harry Markopolos was all over Madoff and reported him to the SEC for years...lotta good THAT did.
Like ALL government, the SEC is corrupt.
Like Enron. It’s less likely but not impossible.
This is the kind of thing a CEO wouldn’t want to acknowledge. If fake revenue, then pay and bonuses for years were fraudulent. If he was to quietly amend the accounting, his first few years using real numbers would pale by comparison leading to downward guidance in the financial press, and further deterioration in stock performance.
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