{"id":2738,"date":"2008-10-28T21:01:41","date_gmt":"2008-10-29T03:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sequence-inc.com\/fraudfiles\/?p=2738"},"modified":"2008-10-29T09:54:49","modified_gmt":"2008-10-29T15:54:49","slug":"only-at-overstockcom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/only-at-overstockcom\/","title":{"rendered":"Only at Overstock.com"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Executives at Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) <a href=\"http:\/\/sec.gov\/Archives\/edgar\/data\/1130713\/000110465908065589\/a08-26812_1ex99d1.htm\">announced last week<\/a> that they&#8217;d be restating financial statements for 2003 through 2008. (And a few of those years were already restated once, so this makes it <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sequence-inc.com\/fraudfiles\/2008\/10\/26\/overstockcom-executives-subject-to-clawback-provision-in-sarbanes-oxley\/\">the third set of financial statements<\/a> that will be issued for those years.)<\/p>\n<p>David Chidester, Senior VP of Finance, explained it like this in his letter to shareholders:<!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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.\u00a0 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\u2019t happening, and we didn\u2019t catch it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Only at the train wreck Overstock.com could a botched <strong>2005<\/strong> accounting system implementation affect the <strong>2003<\/strong> financial statements. How on earth could an error caused by a new accounting system <strong>go back in time<\/strong> to affect the financial statements two years prior?<\/p>\n<p>Unless of course, management <a href=\"http:\/\/garyweiss.blogspot.com\/2008\/10\/overstockcoms-emily-litella-financials.html\">is lying<\/a> about the problem?<\/p>\n<p>Naw&#8230;&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p>But what could the real explanation possibly be? 2003 and 2004 financial statements couldn&#8217;t be affected by a botched 2005 accounting system implementation. Yet 2003 and 2004 are being restated. What&#8217;s the real explanation for restating those years?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Executives at Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) announced last week that they&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/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":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fraud-news-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Z0e-Ia","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2738","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=2738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2738\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}