If you don’t follow Tesla, it’s the company that sells sporty electric cars with the line that “…an electric car need not be a driving sacrifice.”  Up until now, a Tesla has cost more than $100,000. But the Model S, which Tesla wants to build at its Fremont, California manufacturing plant, will be released in 2012 for the comparatively low price of $49,900.  Tesla expects demand for the Model S to be good, and it has plans to roll out an even less expensive electric car a few years down the road.

While reading the amended registration statement that Tesla filed June 15, we noticed that this month, Tesla identified a costly error that related to some stock options the company granted in the 4th quarter of 2009. Some of the options vested immediately, and Tesla stated:

“We erroneously accounted for the expense on a straight-line basis over the term of the award, while expense recognition should always be at least commensurate with the number of awards vesting during the period. As a result, selling, general and administrative expenses and net loss for the year ended December 31, 2009 were understated by $2.7 million.”

Tesla added that the error didn’t impact the value of the stock options; and since those are a non-cash item, the error also won’t impact the net cash figure stated for operating activities.

Although it characterized the error as a serious one, Tesla said it didn’t constitute a material weakness. It explained the difference as follows:

“…We also evaluated this control deficiency in the context of our internal control over financial reporting and based on the magnitude, nature and extent of the error, determined that such deficiency would be considered a significant deficiency. A significant deficiency is a deficiency or a combination of deficiencies, in internal control over financial reporting, that is less severe than a material weakness, yet important enough to merit attention by those responsible for the oversight of the company’s financial reporting.”

The company plans to correct the error by recording an additional stock-based compensation expense of $2.4 million for the three-month period that ends June 30, 2010.

Hopefully the accountants will soon work out any remaining bugs, and Tesla can start on its journey to profitability.

Image source: jurvetson via Flickr

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Well, yesterday those numbers became a lot clearer because FriendFinder, filed this S-1. Quite frankly, we would have expected them to file it today — given that it’s Christmas and the SEC is closed on Friday, so it would have been easier to bury. What the numbers show is that there’s an awful lot of bored suburbanites out there (and people who live in the city and rural areas too). The filing shows that there are 1 million people who pay about $19 a month for access to the adult sites. Revenues were $244 million for the first nine months of the year.

Lots of other bloggers — including many who don’t normally read SEC filings — have been all over this story (see here and here among others) and the S-1 does make for fascinating reading, especially the part that warns about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern. But at 469 pages, it’s a lot to get through.

My guess is that bored suburbanites notwithstanding, this will probably never actually go public. After all, they’ve been talking about it since March and it doesn’t seem like a great time for any IPOs, let alone a controversial one with some tough numbers. But I’ve been wrong before.

Clearly, this is in the running for one of the more interesting pre-Christmas filings. Still, judging by the pace of filings today, my guess is there will be more. We’ll be back on Monday with a look at those.

Controversial CEO Dov Charney is currently dealing with one lawsuit alleging sexual harassment and wrongful termination. According to the filing, the lawsuit has been stayed, but a potentially bigger problem is that the company that provides D&O insurance is saying it’s not obligated to cover the lawsuit because it alleges that American Apparel provided “false representations” when it took out the insurance policy. While the dispute with Navigators Insurance had been disclosed in the past, there’s greater details in the current filing.

The K also discloses three additional complaints with the EEOC and various state and local agencies, but provides few details to really assess the severity of the claims. For example, the filing notes that “Mr. Diorio claims that the Company unlawfully discriminated against him based upon his race, sex, gender, color and/or national origin” on Feb. 15 and gives a file number, but doesn’t say whether Diorio is an employee, a customer, or someone else. That’s also true for the two other new complaints: names and file numbers are provided, but not much else.

But it’s the last disclosure under legal proceedings that leaves us with even more questions: “On Feb. 4, 2008, the Company received a request from the Securities and Exchange Commission to voluntarily provide certain information for the period between the announcement and the closing of the acquisition.” That kind of sounds like an informal request for information, but it’s hard to be sure from the disclosure on what the SEC is looking for. In any event, it’s clearly another distraction for the company.

Though we missed this in the earlier S-1s, mostly because we don’t pay enough attention to them, footnoted intern Rohan Poojara caught it in this filing from yesterday. The list of Shaw’s perks, which also include an apartment in the Bay Area, a car, and a gross-up cost ArcSight $220K last year, or more than 50% of Shaw’s $400K in salary. The biggest chunk — just over $100K — was for the gross-up.

While the apartment and the gross-up aren’t that unusual, it’s the yacht club that really stands out. A quick scan of registration statements for the past year shows that Shaw is in a club of one: no other CEO of a newly public company is getting their employer to pick up their yacht club membership. A further search of proxy statements for all companies from the past year goes even further: no other company has disclosed paying for a yacht club for their CEO or any other top executive. The yacht club, we’re guessing, is in Cabo, since both Montana and Cupertino, where ArcSight is based, aren’t exactly yacht-accessible.

BTW — my friends at Docu-Drama have their own interesting find from ArcSight’s debut: the CIA’s venture firm, In-Q-Tel sold about 215,330 shares at the $9 offering price yesterday. In-Q-Tel still owns about 1 million shares.

Granted, none of these underwriters are exactly household names. But you do have to wonder what would prompt two to jump ship. Of course, that wasn’t the only change in Friday’s filing. Gulfstream also reduced the size of the offering to 800,000 shares, down from 1 million shares initially and 1.2 million in an amended filing in October. And the price of the IPO came down to $9 a share, from the $10 to $13 range initially talked about. Friday also saw a change in the offering costs to $2.60 a share from the $1.97 noted earlier. All of this means that instead of  $8.4 million in proceeds, the company only expects to get $5.1 million, which hardly seems worth the cost of all of these amended filings.

Then again, if ferrying people around Florida doesn’t work, there’s always work for the Defense Department, which isn’t as sensitive to things like people defaulting on their mortgages. As the company notes in its filing, in June 2006, it began a long-term contract with Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) offering two to three flights daily between West Palm Beach and Andros Island in the Bahamas, which required a special certification from the DoD.

Given all that activity — there were five separate SEC filings from the company yesterday — it’s understandable that this 8-K on the resignation of Managing Director Phillip Burnaman might not have attracted much notice. Burnaman had been in charge of NewStar’s Structured Products, which according to the slides released yesterday, represents the smallest piece of NewStar’s portfolio. Still, the company didn’t provide any details on why Burnaham was stepping down — not even for personal reasons. But there may be a hint from this sentence in his online bio: “Mr. Burnaman has been involved with mortgage-backed, asset-backed and real estate-related securities since 1984.” (Ed note: NewStar wasted no time on Thursday taking the bio down, so we had to turn to archive.org to change the link). The lack of attention seems particularly strange because just last month, NewStar issued this release on the resignation of one of its directors.

Since going public last December at $17, NewStar’s stock has continued to decline. The separation agreement attached to yesterday’s 8-K provides Burnaman with a $450K payment and a few other goodies, including accelerated vesting of options. As earlier filings note, Burnaman is also the head of the audit committee for California Coastal Communities (CALC), another stock that has dropped sharply this year.

So even piecing the filings together, investors seem to only be getting part of the story here.

Fast forward to this summer, when 3Com announced plans to spin off TippingPoint via an IPO, though for some strange reason, it never filed an 8-K announcing its plans, even though it announced its fourth quarter earnings that same day. There’s also been additional talk in some of 3Com’s filings, including in the proxy filed yesterday, which noted that the company is continuing to cover TippingPoint President James Hamilton’s housing, commuting costs and gross up through fiscal 2008 “in light of the need to retain his services while the Company contemplates strategic options for the TippingPoint business unit.”

So far, at least, there hasn’t been an S-1 that’s surfaced. But there has been an interesting trail of comment letters, including this one that was sent on June 1 and which talks about 3Com’s accounting for TippingPoint. The issue appears to have been resolved, judging by a follow-up letter from the SEC on June 19. Still, it was only a week later than 3Com announced its plans to spin-off TippingPoint. Coincidence? Perhaps. Or maybe, it’s just taken that long to admit to an expensive mistake.

A quick skim of some of the filings — at nearly 300 pages for Och-Ziff Capital and a whopping 561 pages for Netsuite, that’s all that’s really possible — shows there isn’t all that much concern over excessive regulation. Even Och-Ziff, which as a hedge fund could be subject to a proposal in both the Senate and the House to change the way partnerships are taxed, which the company says would have a material impact, isn’t exactly ringing the regulatory alarm bells. In both filings, Sarbanes-Oxley is mentioned several times, but only in relation to both companies needing to improve its internal controls.

There was also a totally quirky thing I picked up in Chinese jewelery maker Fuqi’s filing: 95% of its employees live in housing provided by the company. While many of us may complain that we can’t seem to separate our home life from our work life, few of us actually live in company-provided housing. Other than a few select CEOs, that is.

Enjoy the Fourth! I’ll be back on Monday with whatever’s been buried!

A quick skim of Hertz’s amended filing shows that the company has added two additional underwriters: Deutsche Banc and Credit Suisse and that it expects the savings from layoffs to climb to $165 million, from $141 million reported earlier. The Hertz filing also provides some new details about the Carlyle Group, noting that it has $58.5 billion under management and had completed 636 deals for $132 billion since 1987, compared with the 528 deals worth $94 billion that was reported in the May 21 filing. Carlyle owns nearly 24% of Hertz and will own 19.2% following the current offering.

As for the Blackstone filing, it’s hard to tell what’s different since the shear size of the filing — 673 pages compared with 431 pages on May 21 — seemed to topple the nifty CompareWizard feature on 10KWizard that I rely on for sorting through these things and finding what’s new. Sure — you can do it by cutting and pasting in Word, but there’s really only so many hours in the day, right?

UPDATE: Dan Primack, over at PEHub is reporting that there’s not much new in Blackstone’s amended filing other than a document relating to a $3 billion investment by China and the addition of some high-profile directors, including former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

That’s because Stanley — not to be confused with Stanley Works (SWK) or Stanley Furniture (STLY) — is focused on defense contracts. Indeed, roughly 65% of its $409 million in revenues according to the K comes from the Department of Defense. That’s up from the 61% on revenues of $345 million that the company disclosed in the amended S-1 the company filed last October, just before it went public at $13 a share. So when the company discloses that “Our business commitments require our employees to travel to potentially dangerous places, which may result in injury to our employees” it seems like more than just another boring risk factor.

Also interesting was the company’s use of the increasingly controversial words “global war on terrorism” which Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards described as a “bumper sticker — political slogan, that’s all it is” during last night’s Democratic presidential debate. In the K, the company only referred to the “global war” three times, down from the five used in the most recent S-1. This, despite the fact that revenues from the “global war” are certainly driving Stanley.

And, now a brief programming note: over the weekend, I installed a feature that brings up stock quotes for various companies that appear on the blog. So now, when you scroll over a company’s name, it will bring up a stock quote.