Last summer, the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission began asking some pretty in-depth questions about the combined filings of United Continental Holdings (UAL), and in particular about its frequent-flier loyalty program. The bottom line: A $100-million hit to revenue in 2012. Anyone who’s ever tried to book a flight using frequent flier miles [...]

We’ve been seeing a spate of auditor changes in recent weeks — not least among them, Netflix (NFLX), which disclosed in an 8-K late last Friday afternoon that it was ditching KPMG, its longtime auditor, in favor of Ernst & Young, after uncomfortable questions raised in recent months about the video company’s accounting (see …

If you’re anywhere near the New York City area (or regularly read the New York Post), you’ve undoubtedly heard of CityTime, the massive government contracting fraud that’s been in the headlines for the past nine months. Last week, Science Applications International Corp. (SAI), the lead contractor on the CityTime project, announced that it would pay [...]

The pharmaceutical industry and the banking industry have this in common: Small companies spring up, stake out a niche, and get gobbled up by bigger competitors looking to get into that territory, in a continuous cycle of innovation, growth (or stumbles) and acquisition. Auxilium Pharmaceuticals (AUXL) is a relatively small biopharmaceutical company, with a market-cap [...]

Not all corporate income is equal: Some is higher quality than others. And few kinds of low-quality income are quite so pernicious as pension income. That’s because it’s hard to spot unless you’re looking out for it — most companies don’t break pension income and expense out separately on their financial statements; it’s embedded in [...]

With the flood of 10-Ks this week and last came a bounty of incremental developments that we wanted to get into subscribers’ hands as quickly as possible. Although we try to use the Pro and even the QuickTake format to go beyond simply reporting the bare details of new disclosures — that’s what our weekly [...]

Yesterday was Leap Day, but it was also a major deadline in the corporate filings world: the date Form 10-K was due for many big companies operating on a calendar year. We’ve been looking at a ton of filings recently — companies filed more than 1,700 10-Ks in the last 10 days, totaling some 270,000 [...]

KKR & Co. (KKR) filed its 10-K late Friday evening, at 7:22 p.m. — so late that it arrived at the Securities and Exchange Commission after the agency’s virtual window had closed, and so the 310-page filing only showed up in the SEC’s Edgar database at 5:05 a.m. today. There were several potentially significant …

Just over a month ago, we sent subscribers our 2012 M&A report: 10 companies that we see as potential takeover targets, based on details and patterns we see in their public disclosures. Three of our 2011 picks announced deals within a few months after last year’s report, and of course we’re hoping for an even [...]

We’re always a little skeptical when a company starts using novel metrics, or even just unusual ones, that seem to take great liberties with generally accepted accounting principles when presenting results to investors. Netflix (NFLX) seems to be making something of a habit of this, and so we thought we’d take a closer look. The [...]