Executives at Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) announced last week that they’d be restating financial statements for 2003 through 2008. (And a few of those years were already restated once, so this makes it the third set of financial statements that will be issued for those years.)

David Chidester, Senior VP of Finance, explained it like this in his letter to shareholders:

As you know, during 2005 we implemented a major system upgrade which also upgraded our accounting system. As part of this accounting system upgrade we changed from recording refunds to customers in batches to recording them transaction-by-transaction.  When we issue a customer refund, the refund reduces the amount of cash we receive from our credit card processors and, as a result, our financial system should reduce our accounts receivable balance. After the implementation, in the instance of some customer refunds, this reduction wasn’t happening, and we didn’t catch it.

Only at the train wreck Overstock.com could a botched 2005 accounting system implementation affect the 2003 financial statements. How on earth could an error caused by a new accounting system go back in time to affect the financial statements two years prior?

Unless of course, management is lying about the problem?

Naw…….

But what could the real explanation possibly be? 2003 and 2004 financial statements couldn’t be affected by a botched 2005 accounting system implementation. Yet 2003 and 2004 are being restated. What’s the real explanation for restating those years?

4 Comments

  1. john lichtenstein 10/29/2008 at 8:57 pm - Reply

    Simple. Before the botched Oracle implementation, the in-house developed “spread sheet” based systems also were not recording returns correctly. But the Oracle implementation made the problem worse. And they never would have figured out the problem with the pre-Oracle systems except that they, apparently recently, did regression testing with the Oracle and legacy process and found problems with both.

    That should have been done before Oracle went on-line, but they had bigger problems at the time so they cut some corners. Testing schmesting.

  2. Overstock.com is restating its financial statements prior to 2005 to reflect its revenue accounting error uncovered by the SEC, earlier this year. Originally, the company used a one-time cumulative adjustment in Q4 2007, rather than a restatement to correct its revenue accounting errors.

  3. Tracy Coenen 10/30/2008 at 11:45 am - Reply

    Ohhh…. So the explanation isn’t the the “hooking up” of the accounting system, it’s general incompetence? Because I never would have guessed that.

  4. […] of incompetence involved as well. Overstock is the only public company I’ve seen which has to restate restated financial statements. The list of accounting manipulations continues to […]

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