What to do when a public company is caught falsifying the credentials of the CFO

So when a public company is exposed for having a CFO who is not a Certified Public Accountant, even though all of their SEC filings say he is, what are they to do?

I have a few suggestions:

1. Pretend we didn’t see the Insider’s post.
2. Rush to Yahoo and make them remove the post, and publicly say “What post?”
3. Acknowledge the information, claim it was (another) oversight, and then ignore it.
4. Claim that’s it’s just another part of the conspiracy of the naughty short sellers.
5. Throw the CFO under the bus. Say that he lied on his resume and we never knew. But promise that we’ll do better in the future.
6. Make the CFO step down. After all, how can we claim to be an ethical company with such big blemish in our executive ranks?

The chances they’ll do #6 are slim to none. Mr. CFO has his finger in the dam, and if he steps down, all hell breaks lose and the company goes down fast.

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