If you pay close attention to Alcoa (AA), chances are you may have caught the announcement back in April that it had hired Audrey Strauss as its new chief legal officer effective August 1. As the release announcing her appointment noted, Strauss was a senior litigation partner at Fried Frank and, earlier in …

FedEx (FDX) filed its 10-K this week, and several items jumped out at us. Both of these involve potentially significant unknowns stemming from actions by two agencies of the federal government: the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Postal Service. First, the FAA, which of course regulates air traffic in the U.S. Late last year, [...]

We’ve long paid attention to the Friday night dump — the filings that come in after 4 pm on Friday, because they’re often pretty juicy. But the Monday-morning dump is often just as interesting: filings that were technically filed on Friday, but because they came in after 5:30 p.m. EST, they don’t show up in [...]

We watch closely for signs that previously unknown criminal and regulatory inquiries are underway, or that existing inquiries have worsened. We’ve had some good success: In February 2012, we warned that investigations into United Technology’s (UTX) role in helping China build an attack helicopter had become a more serious issue for the company [PDF]. …

Movie distributor Lions Gate Entertainment (LGF) just filed an amendment to its 10-K disclosing, in a roundabout way, that it was restating elements of its cash-flow statement, as well as the material weakness in its controls that allowed the original error. From a quick read, it looks like the company miscategorized more than $50 million [...]

Late yesterday, Ralcorp (RAH) filed one of the most confusing 8-Ks that we’ve come across in a long time. Because we firmly believe that there are no accidents when it comes to SEC filings, we thought it was worth putting out a QuickTake, even though the headline — yet another accounting restatement for …

First, some quick background: Last October, the SEC issuednew guidance on how companies were supposed to disclose both risks and problems related to cyber-security. We started tracking those disclosures shortly after that guidance came out and it’s largely been a big snore-fest. At the overwhelming majority of companies, this has led to some additional …

DaVita (DVA) is the country’s second-biggest kidney dialysis provider, and despite its planned expansion — in May, it announced plans to acquire HealthCare Partners, a big medical group and doctor network — most of its revenue is likely to come from its 1,800-plus dialysis centers. As a result, we think investors should take note of [...]

During the thick of 10-Q filings season, we sent a number of QuickTakes out. But now that we’ve had a chance to catch our breath, we wanted to go back and highlight some of the more significant disclosures that didn’t quite warrant a QuickTake, but seemed more significant to us than just including in the [...]

It’s been a tough few weeks for investors in Accretive Health (AH). The stock has fallen 42% since April 24, when this story appeared in The New York Times, highly critical of some of the company’s techniques for collecting overdue patient accounts (its primary business). That same day, Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson, who filed …