Activision Deactivates 15 Years Of Financials

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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From AAO Weblog

And they’re not the only ones setting the controls of the WABAC machine for the early 1990’s.

Sherman and Mr. Peabody, the dog and his boy who went back in time to fix mistakes in history with the aid of the WABAC machine (as in “wayback”), would be busy with backdating right now. If they were around.

In this nonreliance 8-K, game maker Activision took its financial information from 1992 to 1996 out of service. No hints as to the amount of compensation adjustment, nor tax effects, nor specific years that were most affected by improper dating. Just the promise of restated financials ahead. Instead of “back to the future,” we’re looking “forward to the past.”

Also spending time with the WABAC machine: Trident Microsystems. According to this 8-K, they’ll be restating from 1994 to 2006, adding an estimated $40 to $50 million of incremental compensation expense. Actual results may vary.

Another trip forward to the past will be taken by Actel. In this nonreliance 8-K, they outline their plans to restate from 1996 to 2006. No clues as to amounts.

This will be a pretty taxing annual report season for some analysts. Not only will there be plenty of current history to digest, there’ll be tons of rewritten history to chew on as well.

http://www.accountingobserver.com/blog/

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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