The CFO of Zale Corp., Mark Lenz has been placed on administrative leave indefinitely. His offense: not disclosing delayed [tag]vendor payments[\/tag] done to improve 2005 cash flow. Vendor payments scheduled for the last two weeks of the company’s fiscal year were delayed until the beginning of the next fiscal year. The [tag]delayed payments[\/tag] totaled $8.2 million, and while they did not affect revenue or earnings, the delayed payments did affect the reported free operating cash flow of $89 million.<\/p>\n
Zale has had lower-than-expected sales of late, and a plan to raise sales this past Christmas failed. The company’s president, Paul Leonard, resigned in February, and the COO, Sue Gove, resigned in March.<\/p>\n
In April, the company announced that it was being investigated by the [tag]Securities and Exchange Commission[\/tag] for [tag]accounting practices[\/tag] related to the timing of vendor payments. The [tag]SEC investigation[\/tag] also includes accounting for extended-service agreements, leases, and payroll accruals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The CFO of Zale Corp., Mark Lenz has been placed on administrative leave indefinitely. His offense: not disclosing delayed [tag]vendor payments[\/tag] done to improve 2005 cash flow. Vendor payments scheduled for the last two weeks of the company’s fiscal year […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-auditing-regulations"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Z0e-2L","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}