Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Earnings quality / pro forma earnings


Here's an oldie but a goodie. Businessweek from 2001.
Key graphs:
Sometimes, as in the case of Enron, fuzzy numbers result from questionable decisions in figuring net earnings. More often, though, the earnings chaos results from a disturbing trend among companies to calculate profits in their own idiosyncratic ways--and an increasing willingness among investors and analysts to accept those nonstandard tallies, which appear under a variety of names, from "pro forma" to "core." (Enron offers its own such version. Before investors untangled the importance of Enron's first announcement, its stock rose briefly because it told investors that its "recurring net income" had met expectations.) The resulting murk makes it difficult to answer the most basic question in investing: What did my company earn?

Why calculate a second set of earnings in the first place? Because the numbers reached by applying generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) are woefully inadequate when it comes to giving investors a good sense of a company's prospects. Many institutional investors, most Wall Street analysts, and even many accountants say GAAP is irrelevant. "I don't know anyone who uses GAAP net income anymore for anything," says Lehman Brothers Inc. accounting expert Robert Willens. The problem is that GAAP includes a lot of noncash charges and one-time expenses. While investors need to be aware of those charges, they also need a number that pertains solely to the performance of ongoing operations.

That's what operating earnings are supposed to do. But because they're calculated in an ad hoc manner, with each company free to use its own rules, comparisons between companies have become meaningless. "No investor--certainly not any ordinary investor--can read these in a way that's useful," says Harvey L. Pitt, chairman of the Securities & Exchange Commission. The SEC is examining whether new rules are needed to clarify financial reports and perhaps restrict use of pro formas.

What's badly needed is a set of rules for calculating operating earnings and a requirement to make clear how they relate to net income. In the end, investors need two numbers--a standardized operating number and an audited net-income number--and a clear explanation of how to get from one to the other.

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