Tag: Michelle Leder

Coffee and Compliance

I just sat down with a fresh cup of coffee from Green Mountain Coffee Keurig brewer. The smell of coffee mixed with stench of compliance failures coming from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc.

You know there is trouble when Sam Antar, the convicted felon and criminal CFO of Crazy Eddie, has you in his sights.

SEC inquiry

On September 20, 2010, the staff of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement informed the Company that it was conducting an inquiry and made a request for a voluntary production of documents and information. Based on the request, the Company believes the focus of the inquiry concerns certain revenue recognition practices and the Company’s relationship with one of its fulfillment vendors. The Company, at the direction of the audit committee of the Company’s board of directors, is cooperating fully with the SEC staff’s inquiry.

That’s from GMCR’s September 28 8-K filing.

When the SEC starts poking around your revenue recognition, it’s generally bad news for the company. The Motley Fool noticed that GMCR’s accounts receivables was growing faster than revenue growth. That increase in accounts receivables is seen when a company is trying to boost sales by giving its customers overly generous payment terms or aggressively trying book sales at the end of the quarter.

Then there is the timing of the disclosure. GMCR was notified on September 20, but did not file the report until 6 business days later on September 28. A 8-K report is supposed to be filed or furnished within four business days after occurrence of the event.

To top it off, there is the possibility of insider trading. Michelle Stacy, the president of the Keurig division sold some shares and options recently. On September 21, 2010, she exercised 5,000 options and then sold those shares for $37 per share.

The expiration dates for those options were not until November of 2018 and March of 2019. It seems a bit early to realize on those shares, but maybe she needed the cash. She had been exercising options.  On August 13 she exercised 30,000 options and exercised 5,000 options on September 13.

The problem is that she exercised options on the day after the company was informed of the SEC inquiry. It could just be a case of bad timing or it could be an illegal sale after acquiring material, nonpublic information.

That is the big problem with insider trading. It’s going to be hard to prove that she did not know about the SEC inquiry. With insider trading, there may be some email that contains a smoking gun. Or you could just be in an entirely implausible scenario.

Hopefully, GMCR has a program in place for corporate directors and employees to sell stock and exercise options. Then Ms. Stacy can show that she had started the program for exercising her options well before the SEC inquiry. Then she can prove that she did not know. Otherwise…..

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Social Media as a Risk Factor

It’s official. Social media is a risk factor. At least according to Estee Lauder and lululemon athletica.

Over at Footnoted, Michelle Leder and her team dig through SEC filings digging up the dirt on bad corporate behavior. They were digging through the 10-K for Estee Lauder when Theo Francis came across a new risk factor.

Our inability to anticipate and respond to market trends and changes in consumer preferences could adversely affect our financial results.

Our continued success depends on our ability to anticipate, gauge and react in a timely and cost-effective manner to changes in consumer tastes for skin care, makeup, fragrance and hair care products, their attitudes toward our industry and brands, as well as to where and how consumers shop for those products. We must continually work to develop, produce and market new products, maintain and enhance the recognition of our brands, achieve a favorable mix of products, and refine our approach as to how and where we market and sell our products. While we devote considerable effort and resources to shape, analyze and respond to consumer preferences, we recognize that consumer tastes cannot be predicted with certainty and can change rapidly. The issue is compounded by the increasing use of social and digital media by consumers and the speed by which information and opinions are shared. If we are unable to anticipate and respond to sudden challenges that we may face in the marketplace, trends in the market for our products and changing consumer demands and sentiment, our financial results will suffer.

It’s not exactly: “We could lose millions if the Twitteratti turn on us.”

Public companies disclose risk factors in their SEC filings trying to inform its stockholders and potential purchasers of its stock about potential losses. Failure to disclose a risk could result in a shareholder suit that the company was hiding its risks.

It looks like Estee Lauder is covering itself in case its customers get ugly in social media, start attacking the company, and stop buying its products.

Ever vigilant, Theo Francis poured back through the SEC database to see if any other companies had disclosed social media as a risk factor in its SEC filings. The only other consumer-product company they  found that lists social media as a risk factor in its 10-K was lululemon athletica, a Vancouver-based maker of “yoga-inspired apparel.”

Social media is not a new disclosure in SEC filings, but it was mostly discussed in marketing strategies and business strategies for tech and media companies. For example, Estee Lauder’s competitor Elizabeth Arden talks about the use of social media as part of its marketing strategy, but does not disclose it as a risk factor.

I wonder if we will see other companies start adding social media as a risk factor. Have you seen any other companies list it as a risk factor?

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Public Companies Fail to Disclose Ethics Waivers

usha rodrigues

According to Usha Rodrigues from University of Georgia Law School and Mike Stegemoller from Texas Tech University – Rawls College of Business, in their paper Placebo Ethics, public companies are failing to disclose ethics waivers.

They focused on Section 406 of Sarbanes-Oxley which requires public companies to disclose when they have granted an ethics waiver to top executives. Section 406(b) states:

“The Commission shall revise its regulations concerning matters requiring prompt disclosure on Form 8-K (or any successor thereto) to require the immediate disclosure, by means of the filing of such form, dissemination by the Internet or by other electronic means, by any issuer of any change in or waiver of the code of ethics for senior financial officers.”

The regulations for Section 406 provide:

§229.406 (Item 406) Code of ethics:
(a) Disclose whether the registrant has adopted a code of ethics that applies to the registrant’s principal executive officer, principal financial officer, principal accounting officer or controller, or persons performing similar functions. If the registrant has not adopted such a code of ethics, explain why it has not done so.

(b) For purposes of this Item 406, the term code of ethics means written standards that are reasonably designed to deter wrongdoing and to promote:

(1) Honest and ethical conduct, including the ethical handling of actual or apparent conflicts of interest between personal and professional relationships; …

Rodrigues and Stegemoller were able to take advantage of the overlap between the 406 disclosure requirements and the disclosures required by Item 404 of Regulation S-K for related party transactions with an amount in excess of $120,000. One of the challenges of determining compliance with disclosure requirements is you can’t tell if there was a need for a disclosure unless the information is disclosed. This overlap allowed them to find items in the 10-k proxy statement that should have been reported immediately under Section 406.

Their sample set was 200 public companies. From January 1, 2003 through December 31, 2007 they found only one waiver filed under Section 406 for these 200 companies. They also looked beyond their sample set and found that of the 5,000± public companies there have only been 36 waivers filed using Form 8-K.

They took the next step and looked at the 10-K filings for their sample set of companies for related party transactions. Fifteen companies failed to disclose related party transactions that should have been reported immediately under Section 406. They found lots of other disclosures that were in a gray area. (This should be no surprise to Michelle Leder at Foototed.org who loves finding these things.)

One theory is that the public companies prefer to dump these related party transactions into the 10-K proxy statement where there is already a flood of information rather than specifically calling out the transaction in a separate Form 8-K. (Again, Michelle Leder loves digging up this stuff.) There is a difference between immediate disclosure and eventual disclosure.

Another surprise in the paper was that most of the companies in the sample set did not prohibit related party transactions in their code of ethics. Only 30 prohibited these transactions. These omissions also would appear to be a violation of Section 406 since the regulation requires a code to deal with conflicts of interest. Personally, I don’t see how you can call something a code of ethics if it does not prohibit related party transactions.

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